All In a Day's Work

Exhibit A:  The following is a shape sorter. Your run-of-the-mill shape sorter full of grapes. The shape sorter was what first greeted me when I ventured downstairs to Will's playroom after a fairly lengthy period of silence.

He had taken the bag of grapes from the counter where I had left them (a momentary lapse of good judgement on my part) and painstakingly removed every single grape from the stem. No small feat, considering the two-pound bag was nearly full.

I'd love to be able to get into his head when he makes these kind of decisions. I imagine his thoughts would go something like this:

"Mmmm...grapes."

"I think I'll just take them downstairs with me. If I'm really quiet and really quick, Mommy will never know."

"Now, what to do with all these delicious grapes? Maybe I'll have a few. And now I'll take all eight million of them off the stem."

"Done. What next?"

"Someplace to put them. If only I had someplace to keep them."

"Oh! I know! The shape sorter. Obviously."

"Perfect."

Exhibit B:  Here is what awaited me in the rest of the room. For starters, the stereo (that word seems hopelessly outdated, doesn't it?) that Will had disassembled the day prior because he said it "needed work". Now it really "needs work."



Exhibit C: Directly behind the disassembled radio, I found this. The digger was digging around in some coffee grounds that Will unearthed from our storage area behind the counter. At least it smelled good. And I guess it would be good for digging around in if I were three.



While I was documenting the above, Will decided to take his clothes off and do some sort of interpretative dance/rolling around/writhing about, all the while saying, "Do you want to see my crack?" Very nice.



For your visual pleasure, I present to you the other end of the playroom. You're welcome.





Both Will and Laura (and Mommy and Daddy, too) have been a little under the weather. I took a picture because this never happens. I think this may be the stillest he's been (while awake, that is) since he was born.

An impromptu photo shoot after breakfast Friday morning yielded a whopping two or three good pictures of both of them. This is the first time since Laura's been here that this has happened. Laura loves Will and Will is beginning to kind of sort of accept being the object of her adoration and affection.



I'll try to write something in the next day or so before we head off to WV for the weekend to spend it at a (different) cabin on a (different) river. Hopefully Will won't want to come back to our white house this time around.

A to Z: A Study in Miscellany

A) Will is not to eat prunes. Yikes. It's too bad that he loves them. (I know. Weird.)

B) Will doesn't hang his coat back on his hook after recess at school. Instead, he throws it on the floor. It's good to know he's equally un-mannerly at home and at school.

C) He has also started taking his shoes off while at school. Why? Who knows. It just seems like the thing to do, I guess. It's always something with him.

D) Apparently our kitchen is even dirtier than I had previously thought because Will just informed me that we needed to get a new kitchen (I can't argue there) because ours "is dirtier and dirtier". Than what, I do not know. I should be cleaning it instead of writing this, apparently.

E) Laura needs to eat more prunes. Like her brother, she seems to have developed some tummy troubles. It's so sad to see a helpless little one in pain.

F) A different kind of pain:  I can't imagine what it would be like years (and years and years) down the road to see her in labor, in the particularly laborish kind of pain that it brings about. It makes me almost weak in the knees to think about her doing that. Myself? For me to go through it again, no problem (well, besides the unrelenting gut-wrenching [literally] pain). Not her, though. I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

G) I have heard no less than two Christmas songs on the radio in the past day or so. It's only November. Not to mention that I loathe Christmas music in general. I loathe it even more when it's played before the Thanksgiving turkey has even been thought about, much less cooked, gravied (proving that gravy is versatile in so many ways, even grammatically so) and devoured.

H) I need to have a parentheses intervention. I love them. ((((((()))))))

I) Will's new favorite word is "stupid". He knows that he's not supposed to say it which makes it all the more appealing. I alternate thinking I should ignore it and it will lose its appeal with thinking that I should duct tape his mouth shut. Kidding. Kind of.

J) I hate lettered lists but I'm too lazy to go back and use numbers instead.

K) Will picked out John Deere tractor fabric for his rice bag that I'm making him.

L) If you don't have a rice bag, get yourself one immediately. Or make one. It will change your life.

M) A rice bag is filled with rice that you heat in the microwave and use like a heating pad. It's good for various aches and pains (I made mine when I was pregnant last winter) and for heating up a cold bed. Will likes a rice bag to warm him up after getting out of the tub.

O) I'm totally convinced that the inventor of the drive-through Starbucks (of which there are far too few) was a mom with two or more children. This may make me seem lazy. This may be correct.

P) I had forgotten about the luxury of crock pot cooking until this past weekend. There's something strangely satisfying about being able to smell your dinner before you even have lunch.

Q) I bought the 30 Day Shred DVDV about 90 or so days ago. No shredding has occurred. The packaging has been opened only because Will tore into it a while back.

R) Maybe we should reconsider our idea of joining a gym. Maybe.

S) The most appealing aspect of this gym? Childcare included in your membership. Yes, I just said that. I am over feeling guilty about not wanting to spend every single waking second with my kids. Well, by "my kids" I actually mean Will. I've not reached that point with Laura yet.

T) Will loves to give me kisses and hugs now. He also loves using them to manipulate me. I let him. When he's feeling sad or mad or whatever now, he always says he needs a hug.

U) I'm going for the whole alphabet with this list!

V) Christmas is seven weeks from Saturday. We have seven weeks full of completely annoying Christmas music to look forward to.

W) Jamison's company Christmas party is on my birthday. When I pointed this out, his response was something like, "Great! We get to have a nice dinner on your birthday that I don't even have to pay for." He's a thoughtful one, isn't he?

X) I also suggested that we go to the gym (that we've yet to even visit, much less join), drop the kids off there under the guise of us working out, and go to the party instead since we don't really have a babysitter here.

Y) Strangest item from Will's Halloween candy: Sun Chips. Who gives out chips? He also got a few packages of pretzels. Is this the new thing?

Z) I did it! A list of 26 completely unrelated, unimportant things from the various corners of my cobwebby brain.

Tricked and Treated

"We looked!
Then we saw him
step in on the mat!
We looked!
And we saw him!
The Cat in the Hat!"
--Dr. Seuss (attribution is almost insulting, since everyone knows who wrote this, but the grammarian/rule-follower part of me can't ignore protocol; see also: weird people who enjoy such things as the AP Stylebook, dictionaries and encyclopedias)

Here is our Cat on our mat (of sorts). I have to say that this costume may be my favorite yet. According to Jamison, it was also a crowd favorite. Something about it suited Will very well. Maybe the mayhem and destruction that the Cat spreads. Just maybe.



We had to stuff the hat with paper towels to get it to stay upright. I'm just glad he actually wore it since it's kind of important to the costume's overall effect.



One of many serious shots of these two. Laura tends to not like anything we do after about 5 pm. It interferes with winding down to her 6 pm bedtime.



The plight of the second child. Hand-me-down costumes. Bumblebee, take two.

And we end in typical fashion.