Wednesday, July 12, 2006

And then there were two

6.27.06



I can feel myself breathing today.

The house is quiet, almost serene, and at times like this I notice the details, the bypassed nuances of life.

My older two, whom we shall call Zee and Bee (the creativity well is dry indeed, folks), are in Michigan with the grandparents. Hub is in Mississippi with the teens, sifting through the wreckage left by Katrina's wrath, rebuilding.

And I am in between, in a quiet and clean house with Elle and Em (the latter of whom is a boy, just to clear things up).

In this blessed two-ness, I have learned a few things. First, it is very hard to turn down a "more cookies?" request from a child who pronounces it "tooties." Especially when this child lacks cookies not because she has eaten them all, but because she has given them away. And to her brother, to boot.

Number two. Hmmm. Okay, so thus far I have only learned one thing. But more are coming, I can feel it.

 






 


6.27.06 continued



All right, I'm back. Number two: cookie dances are very rewarding. For those of you unfamiliar with a cookie dance, it consists of the word "tootie" over and over, with a measure of happy bouncing as one walks toward the cupboard.

Number three: when you are one, you walk cute. I don't know when the cuteness goes, exactly, or how it seeps away, but by two, three at the most, it is definitely finished. Luckily, oodles of other things are quite yummy at those ages, like made up vocabularies and stealth practicing.

On vocabularies:
Zee has this word "poink." We've ascertained, from context, that it means a combination of poke and point. And when you are almost six, life is full of poinky things. Such as:

"Mom, something in my shirt is poinking me."

Brothers are poinky too. "Stop it! I said stop it! Mom, he poinked me in the head!"

This I will assuredly miss when he is seven.

The stealth rehearsals usually involve some form of Sneaking Up on Mom. Bee and Zee give each other missions to accomplish: crawl down the hallway and belly-slither into the room where Mom is sewing, without being detected. Rarely are these missions successful, as the boys are still rather detectable.

Once in a while they manage a stealth exercise that does not involve me as the target. One such occasion occurred on a memorable night last week, long after the children had been relegated to bed.

From my sewing room down the hall, I could tell that much fun was being had. Entirely too much fun for children who had been sent to bed. So I ambled from my chair in time to witness Bee zip from his room, fire a dart gun into his brothers' bedroom, then race back across the hall and dive into bed. A cursory glance into room number two revealed Zee and Em, both out of bed, crouched with dart guns in hand.

The guns went quickly missing.

And although the boys got a good scolding, I must admit that I laughed the whole way back to my sewing machine.

Yummyness abounds.

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