Better Than Ever!

Nathan had another appointment with the eye doctor today and we are all jazzed!  He is doing better than he has ever done: 20/20 in both eyes with his current prescription!  And that is after three months of no patching!  The doctor was very happy, as were we.  We will go back in July, but we are just in the watch and wait and make sure his eye doesn't regress stage.  I think we're all starting to think that maybe he is actually done with the patching for good.

Is It Possible For Him To Get Any Smart Aleckier?

Matthew is a four year old with an incredibly sassy mouth that is due to the fact that he is too smart for my own good.  He is a little baby sponge: he only has to hear something once for it to become a permanent part of his vocabulary.  So I try not to give him too much ammunition for his sassiness.  But try as I might, things have a way of being said…and heard.  Tonight Nathan was getting ready for school and bed at his regular pace: he makes a tree sloth look speedy.  In an ineffectual attempt to speed him up, Kev called out, “Get your tushy in gear!”  From down the hall I heard Matthew: “Ha, ha!  Tushy in gear!  I get that word!” 

I can hardly wait to see how Matthew decides to use his latest vocabulary acquisition.

Nudity Is Not An Option

My children have always hated being naked.  When they were toddlers I never had to worry about them stripping down and flashing everyone because they just didn’t do it.  Being clad in just a diaper was a punishment of the highest order.  Matthew wouldn’t even wear his pajamas to preschool when they had pajama day last month because getting dressed is just the right thing to do before going to school.  As time has passed, this tendency has continued for all my boys and while I believe that modesty is an admirable trait, sometimes I think it can go a bit too far.  Say, for instance, that you share a room with a sibling and are so concerned about anyone seeing you without clothes on that you can’t get dressed while the aforementioned sibling is in the room even though you will always have all the important parts covered by your underwear.  That is how Nathan is.  He usually gets dressed in the bathroom, but if the bathroom is unavailable he will scream at Matthew to get out of the room before he will get dressed.  And Matthew, of course, is loath to comply with these high decibel requests.  It is, after all, his room to.  And really, he isn’t hurting anyone by just sitting there, right?

I had assumed that Matthew stuck around just to irritate Nathan since that seems to be one of his goals in life.  I didn’t realize that Matthew had completely clued in to the reason behind Nathan’s conniptions until Nathan went to take a shower tonight and I heard Matthew taunting him through the closed bathroom door: “When you come out I’ll see your belly button!”

What a little smart aleck.

I've Always Considered Red To Be Our Lucky Color

No leprechauns visited our house last night.  Matthew nearly had a meltdown when he woke up and discovered that his pancakes were green.  None of us bothered to wear any green at all.  For dinner we had plain old stew.  I couldn’t see spending the extra money to buy lamb to make a traditional Irish stew when I knew my kids would prefer beef.  And they won’t eat corned beef so it was just the regular kind.  I wasn’t in the mood for cabbage so I skipped that as well.  Matthew wouldn’t even let me take a picture of him in the cute hat he made at preschool.  The only really authentic thing we did today was have raisins in our soda bread. (Which was very tasty, by the way.  A touch of sweetness to perfectly balance the tartness of the buttermilk.)

I guess it’s a good thing we have Chinese blood and not Irish because the Luck O’ the Irish is so not going to be with us this year.

Construction In The Basement

In a moment of blessed peace, two of my offspring quit fighting long enough to collaborate on a building project in the basement.  And what did they build?  A library, of course.

Here are the architects:

They were very proud of their accomplishment.  I was thrilled beyond belief to have an hours long span of no arguing.  I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love that my kids really, really love the library.  I don’t think there are many better places to enjoy spending time.

Dear Mr. Bill Cosby . . .

Anyone who knows anything about Bill Cosby knows that he is a funny man.  Most people know that he is also a family man.  Way back before the “The Cosby Show” made him a weekly presence in households across America, he used elements of his family life in his stand up routines to great comedic effect.  Listening to these routines was a regular occurrence in my home while I was growing up (I learned the word “conniption” from Bill Cosby and it is a word that I have used often in my lifetime.) and I thought they were funny because I couldn’t imagine any child ever being as completely idiotic as he made his out to be.  Fast forward twenty years and I still listen to those routines but now I realize that they are funny because he was right.  Bill Cosby was right about everything.  If you throw in the nightly sniff check to make sure they did in fact use soap, “The Same Thing Happens Every Night” is pretty much a documentary of what evenings are like at my house.  I kid you not.  Well, maybe not the beatings, but the rest is pretty accurate.  In spite of how smart my children are, there are moments when I really have to stop and call them idiot children under my breath.

Today I got to use one of Bill Cosby’s great lines in my real life during an actual conversation with one of my children.  When Kev got home from work, he noticed that Nathan’s hair was looking weird.  I had not noticed this because Nathan is getting tall enough that unless I am standing right by him and intentionally looking right at the top of his head, I have a tendency to get more of a side view of his hair.  Kev looked closer and realized that there was a spot right up on the top in the middle where the hair was much shorter than the hair on the rest of his head.  The conversation that followed went something like this:

Kevin: “When did you cut your hair?”

Nathan: “I don’t know.”

Kevin: “No, really.  When did you cut your hair?”

Nathan: “I don’t know.”

At this point, I just could not resist and threw in a Cosby-ism:

Me: “Was your head with you all day today?”

Kev and I both snickered.  Nathan, not so much.  After a few more minutes of questioning we got him to admit that last week he was scratching his head while holding a pair of scissors.  We spent five more minutes asking why in the world he was scratching his head while holding a pair of scissors in the same hand.  His response, of course, “I don’t know.”  After that we just gave it up and figured his next haircut will be a buzz to even everything out.

So if you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Bill Cosby’s take on life with children, take a few minutes to listen.  I promise you it will be time well spent.  And you just might pick up a line or two to use with your own offspring.

"The Same Thing Happens Every Night"
"Kill the Boy"