Friday Updates

A. Religiously, my younger son has come home from school every day this week, shut his bedroom door for a while, and then emerged with more papers in this old pickle jar. The “papers” are our Christmas presents from him.

B. As of Monday, our fridge is finally no longer leaking all over our floor (or beeping incessantly, a later development in what I now call The Saga of the Appliances). We have high hopes for having the oven restored to its intended glory sometime next week. Girlfriend needs to do some serious baking soon.

C. My younger son and I made a gingerbread house this week. Three years ago, I had the idea that the small people would make a gingerbread house together, with minimal supervision. At the time, they were 6, 4, and 1 respectively. There is no explanation for what I was thinking. None. Obviously, I made the gingerbread house. And sadly, it appeared as if the small people had in fact made it.

So, since then, I’ve tried convoluted measures of distraction whenever the subject of gingerbread houses comes up, like, “Hey, want to go to Disney World tomorrow?” and “Wait, did I just see SpongeBob walking outside the store?”

This year, however, all distractions proved futile. Even LCB’s circumloquacious nature proved no match for my son’s tenacity.

So, he and I spent the better part of Wednesday night putting together one of those pre-baked kits. And I will say, my son did the lion’s share of it. I warned him that I could not make the swirls like the ones on the picture on the box. He refused to believe me, and after being disappointed with his own attempts, he insisted that I make the swirl above the window. After I finished, his only response was, “I wish I had made the swirl.”

D. In a store this week, a sweet little girl who looked not unlike Shirley Temple (albeit with less curls) walked up to me and asked, “Do you have kids?”

“I do,” I answered.

“Here, take this then,” she said, and threw a large stuffed animal (with tags) in my cart.

Having no idea what it even was at first, I asked, “Are you sure you don’t want it?”

“I do want it, but I can’t have it, so you should take it,” she surmised, most logically I think.

I smiled and thanked her, and then her mom suddenly realized what she had done and grabbed the stuffed animal back, not overly amused, while her mother’s friend and I smiled and tried not to laugh. Honestly, the delivery was beyond adorable.

E. Recently, my older son has decided to take the higher path, the road less traveled. To wit, he has determined that all math shall be done in his head. Every. Single. Problem. Regardless. Of. Magnitude. While it may turn out to foster great mental fortitude in him, the road less traveled is starting to give me headaches. Seriously. I can’t look at his face when he is doing math anymore. It births angst in me.

F. Baby-girl came to me upset the other night. “I don’t want to be cute,” she moaned.

“Okay,” I answered cautiously.

“I don’t want to be very cute, either,” she clarified.

“Okay.”

“And I don’t want to be adorable, either.”

“Honey, do you know what adorable means?”

“No.”

So I explained it to her, and then asked, “What do you want to be?”

“Well, I only want to be a little cute. Could you tell Daddy and brothers that I only want to be a little cute?”

“Okay honey, I’ll tell them.”

And thus she managed, with that exchange, to have completely sabotaged her own objective.

4 Replies to “Friday Updates”

  1. I want to be a lot a bit cute. Does that work for adults? haha
    She is completely adorable. #failedmission

    1. Don’t we all? Actually, she just picked up an elf hat today (after getting a Santa hat yesterday), and she’s spent the afternoon going through stores with her elf hat on. Oh, to be able to pull that one off like she can!

  2. So by declaring her intent not to be cute or adorable, she only managed to intensify those attributes in herself. Such is the story of womanhood. 😉 I die every time I see her little pink cowboy boots–SO adorable. I admire your courage to tackle a gingerbread house, as they scare the bejeezes out of me. Mostly because the very convenient store-bought kits are not safe for us, and the from-scratch alternative is frightening. Thanks to Ultimate Gingerbread Houses on Food Network, I doubt I will ever try to make one from scratch.

    1. Oh, I couldn’t even watch that show. It’d be fun, but so completely overwhelming and discouraging if I watched trying to envision my own gingerbread house. Yes, I view an attempt to make one from scratch as an experiment in insanity.

      Now, don’t you have a pair of pink cowboy boots? Maybe you should! 🙂

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