Random Stuff

No time for great prose, witty observations of everyday life or lofty ponderings.

But stuff has happened and I need to make the updates.

We’re having our house painted. We’re pretty sure it’s been the same color for the last fifteen years, but we can only confirm seven of them, the ones we’ve actually spent living in it.

It’s pretty bad off; the south side of the house has been shedding paint flakes for quite a while. It hardly took the contractors any time at all to scrape it off: the peeling paint was surely happy to be put out of its misery. They’re priming it right now and will start taping off and spraying tomorrow. It’s going from a drab, confused blue-grey to a much richer, solid deep blue. One that commands attention and respect. Given the non-committal olive-golden-grey-green sorts of house colors in the neighborhood, ours will most definitely stand out.

Michael’s pretty excited about the whole process. I’ve only had to rescue the contractors from his shrill interrogations twenty or thirty times. They’re good natured about it, though, answering his questions as best they can. And considering the standard obliqueness of his sentence structure, they did really well. I informed him, though, that they need to concentrate on their work and that he needed to stay inside.

I tried to work from home yesterday, hoping somehow he had advanced enough in maturity to keep himself occupied for long stretches of time while I pounded on my laptop keyboard in the other room.

Not so much. I don’t think I’d heard the phrase “Mommy… I mean, Daddy…” so many times in my entire career as a parent as I did yesterday.

Partly I stayed home in order to provide a proper send-off for my mom, who packed up and drove back down the road to Sacramento. And I didn’t want to put poor Mikey in the day care that he doesn’t like (“The School With The Little Door”).

While I did get some critical and important items completed, I could have been a whole lot more productive if I wasn’t fetching fish sticks, orange juice, letter fries and ketchup, and if I wasn’t getting up every twenty minutes to help free him from some virtual internet tidepool he’d become trapped in while playing his computer games. I tried to explain that if he’d make an effort to LEARN TO READ, he probably could avoid a lot of headaches.

The real clincher came just before I called it a day. At loose ends, for the seven hundredth time that day, he decided to surprise his daddy with a “gift”. He placed a soda can, from which he’d taken maybe three sips, into a medium-sized cardboard box and closed the flaps. “Daddy! I have a surprise for you!” he called as he picked up the box and began jogging toward me. He checked his motion in mid-stride and looked down. From his sudden change in stride I could tell something wasn’t right. “Oh, great…” he says, as brown liquid seeped from the corners of the box.

It was here that I finally noticed what he was doing, and the reality of the bits of imagery that had snuck into my vision’s periphery finally connected with my parental sensibilities.

Needless to say, when I saw just how much of a mess 12 ounces of caramel-colored carbonated soda can make when they’re distributed from within the confines of a cardboard box, I was not pleased.

I informed him that he was done, and needed to consider his behavior from the sanctum of his own bedroom. In not so many words.

Swimming lessons were not much better. He did well in his practice, showing great progress in his ability to do various strokes and to push off from the wall. But despite my admonishments he repeatedly splashed his classmates when the teacher wasn’t looking.

Bedtime came early yesterday.

School will be starting soon. He can’t wait, and I can’t say I’m not just a little bit excited for it myself.