Body Parts, Part I

Body Parts, Part I

         I hug and kiss my children all the time, I tell them when they move out I’ll slow down on that. Adam and I were passing each other in the hallway one day when I stopped him, leaned down to kiss him and he says in the most serious way “Sometimes my underwear gets stuck in my butt.” I wanted to laugh but as I am an inch away from his face I don’t laugh, I just continue to look him in the eye, waiting for the rest. “I pull it out” is the rest of his thought. I smile and tell him I think that’s a good idea, I kiss him and send him on his way and then laugh my head off.

 

One night we were having some grilled cheese sandwiches and watching TV. The kids were lying on the floor and were actually being good. Drew has a problem; he needs help immediately so he asks me to assist him. "Mom", he says, "will you come over here and scratch my butt?" Honestly? This is what I have been reduced to? This is one of my duties as ’mother’? This is a reasonable request from my five year-old? As tempting as it is to walk across the room and be Drew’s hero, to save him from an itch on his behind, to fulfill one more duty as his mother, to help him with this crisis that has obviously vexed him into needing my help in the most dire way…I decide to pass. Someday he’ll have a wife who will think that I spoiled him and that he could’ve been a good man if I hadn’t ruined him. When it comes to scratching his tush, he’s on his own. Take that future Mrs. Andrew Blodgett, I didn’t indulge him too much.

 

            When kids are small there is that game of ‘got your nose’. You know, where you pretend to take their nose with your knuckles and then stick the end of your thumb out between the knuckles so it looks like you actually got their nose? I did that to Adam once. Once. He screamed and freaked out all over the place with his little hands covering where his nose ‘used to be’ before I cruelly snatched it to leave him nose-less. He was yelling ‘Put it back! Put it back!’ before I could calm him down and tell him it was just a game. I open my hands to show that I didn’t actually have his nose, that it was still on his little face but since it wasn’t in my hand that meant, to him, that I had lost it so I told him he was right, I did have his nose and to move his hands so I could put it back. I made a big show of dusting it off and securing it to his face. So much drama.

 

            I was in the kitchen one day with Drew and he looked particularly cute so I said to him "How did you get to be so pretty?" He pointed to my tummy and looked up at me then ran off. I took that as a huge compliment.