Reproduction

            One day, coming home from a concert at the high school we saw some bald eagles. They are really common in our area these days but I never tire of seeing them. Drew was asking if eagles have baby eagles. I told him they lay eggs like all birds. He asked if all animals lay eggs and I told him no, that some are born like he was, all wiggly and small and not in an egg. I also explained that everything has babies or they just can’t continue to exist, that I had been a child and now I have children and that they will someday have children, everything must have children if they are to continue in our world and that if eagles stopped laying eggs that they would no longer be around someday. Adam decided to enter this conversation. “Not everything has babies” he says. I disagree with him. He tells me that power lines don’t have babies. I tell him that he is correct in his assessment. I guess I neglected to mention that these things that have babies to continue in our world have to be living things. And here I thought I’d done so well in my explanation.

No Weight Loss Needed

            I monitor what the boys watch. Part of the job description. Anyway, I keep it pretty safe with all of them but the little boys especially. That being said I was rather taken aback one day when Adam came to me in the kitchen and gave a little sigh and said “I need to lose some weight.” Say again? He informed me that he was too heavy and needed help losing weight because being too big makes people unhealthy. Now this is not something that I thought I’d ever have to deal with because I have sons and not a daughter in sight to look at models and television and think she needs to look that impossibly perfect. We have a talk right there. I tell him that he is the perfect weight and that he is in no danger of needing to lose weight and that losing weight is not something that need ever cross his mind again. That child don’t diet and that I don’t know where he got such an idea. I know that with all of my positive comments and reinforcement of the facts that he is going to put this out of his mind. That’s when he told me that he needed to lose weight because the television told him so. Now I am confused and tell him that I need him to explain a little more and I am trying to think of what show I had on for him as to why such a theme would be addressed. A commercial was playing and it was for, of course, weight loss products. Since he was the only one in the room it, the commercial, was speaking directly to him. The voice on the commercial kept saying “you” need to lose weight and since he was the only one in the room it was telling him that he needed some help to trim down. I told him that the commercial was only for people who need help losing weight and that it is completely up to the person to decide for themselves and that he is not in either category. Seven years-old and 52 pounds go together perfectly. Captain Literal rides again.

Little Kids and Dining Out

     I am not fond of taking my kids out to do much of anything. Not because I’m ashamed of them but because they are such little handfuls. We were having lunch in a small restaurant out of town one day on our way home from a brief vacation. The little boys had just turned one so Alex was six. Anyway, we were sitting at our table feeding the little boys and trying to keep them under control when Adam took one of his little chicken strip pieces and tossed it backward over his head. To my mortification it landed in the middle of a table of ladies having lunch. We packed up everything to go and I retrieved the chicken strip piece from the middle of the table of ladies and offered my apologies. They were so gracious and, I think, amused, that they told us they had all raised children and understood. I picture them laughing after we left and were out of earshot.

Being Lazy Takes Practice

            Coming home the other day I told my sons that when we arrived at home that we all four were going to clean out the van. It was turning to spring and was a nice enough day that we weren’t going to freeze doing it. Nothing much, some trash, extra clothes that had been left, the occasional water bottle, easy stuff. Drew is lazy, really lazy. He is so dramatic in his laziness that I am constantly impressed with the lengths he’ll go to avoid any amount of work. He is very Shakespearian in his performances. Hand on his forehead, big, deep, cleansing breaths, stretching out to his full length on the couch or floor saying “I just can’t” and things of that nature. We continued to drive in silence for a little while when Drew spoke up from the back seat saying “I think that I’ll just get dad to pitch to me for a while until you all are finished cleaning out the van.” Quite matter-of-fact, quite grown-up in his delivery, quite wrong in his assumption. I told him that he could either help all of us or he would do it all by himself and we would watch him. This didn’t go over well but it did hit home with the little slacker. He was in-charge of the recycle.

Nocturnal Creatures

 

            When the twins were born Alexander had just turned five. He has always had a big vocabulary and understands the words he uses. He mainly was around adults and his father and I have a habit of throwing around fifty dollar words anyway. After a particularly hard night of our boys being awake all night and mom being dead on her feet and miserable Alexander shakes his little head and says to me “Our babies are nocturnal.” A truer statement was never uttered in the history of the world.

A Change in the Lyrics

    Coming home from piano lessons one afternoon found Drew singing a little song. This is nothing
new but sometimes I am busy thinking about something and don’t listen as I should. I heard that he
was singing "Old MacDonald" but it sounded a little different so I decided to not ask him what he
was singing but to listen and see if he’d repeat it. I was rewarded in a big way. He was singing "Old
MacDonald" but when he got to the chorus it wasn’t "Ee I, Ee I, O" it was "G.I., G.I. Joe." I laughed
so hard at that and told him how much I loved his song. He didn’t know what was so funny but he
obliged me with another verse.

Scary Twinkies

     Twinkies present a problem in our home. Adam has trouble saying Twinkie. Sometimes it comes out “Twinkle” and sometimes it comes out “Pinkie”…a work in progress. Drew, on the other hand, does not care for Twinkies because he doesn’t like the dots on the back of them. “Dots?” I ask. Yes, where the filing was shot into the Twinkie on the bottom of them bothers him and he won’t eat them. I think it has something to do with WALL-E. In the movie WALL-E, WALL-E has a pet cockroach and he, at one point in the movie, climbs into the bottom of the Twinkie through one of the filling holes and sticks his head out another of the filling holes. That thinking is more along Adam’s neurosis level but they do switch personality traits quite frequently.