Lovelihood

I'm a little out of my comfort zone here, immersed in organza and chiffons and shimmery ribbons in a most girly array of fairy-descent pastels. But stabbing it all with some several dozen pins isn't without a therapeutic quality.

If I had to make a guess, I'd say The Boy spends roughly fifteen percent of his waking hours drumming up ways to forestall bedtime. He picks the longest bedtime book, feigns mortal thirst, throws an epic fit over another major injustice done to him by our clock-watching hands. Tried and true, though, is his technique of coming downstairs, sister in tow, to use the bathroom. At the worst of it, five, six times a night. Lately more like two or three times a week. Tonight, it was two times. But he always remembers to wash his hands.

I'm guilty of throwing out the occasional smart alecky "Actually..." (accompanied by a slightly wagging finger) and needling grammar correction and irritated grunt when asked to repeat myself. And these are all things The Boy has picked up from me. He's also taken to using the phrase "I'm switching it up," whose origin we can't trace in our own home. He curses in SpongeBob and co-opts Charlie Brown's "good grief" on a semi-daily basis. He's in the linguistic sponge stage of development. When I was little I used to call these wishblows. And now The Boy does, too.

Our kitchen is exactly as old as our 60-odd-year-old house. Which is to say, not built to the exacting standards of dishwasher manufacturers. And yet, there, between the fridge and the stove, and buffered by two narrow cabinets is one dishwasher. It's unclear how the plumbing works back there. I prefer not to think about it. But there's this little vent that snakes up through the wall, ending up on the backsplash behind the still unopened bottle of luchadorian branded Australian wine.

A leeeetle pink elephant tape dispenser found its way into The Boy's easter basket yesterday. It's positively uncanny how well that easter bunny knows our Boy.

I picked up the other day a couple strings of outdoor solar powered lights. Because our back porch is blessed neither with any kind of lighting, save for whatever might be gleaned from the other side of the french doors, nor any kind of external power outlet. These little, decoratively-caged lights fit the bill for outdoor lighting that doesn't require access to the power grid. And even on a solar-poor day as this one, the lights reliably switched on once the sun, already hiding behind an impenetrable gray blanket, dropped behind some unseen western horizon.

It's the day before easter and the sun couldn't be brighter, bringing the daytime high way up to the mid-60s, making it positively summer-like. So our plan to do the easter hunt at the zoo was a go. We've done it before, before we left for Texas where being out under the April sun was bearable for only a couple minutes at a time. So we were prepared for the mass dump of plastic egg empties into open fields. A challenging hunt, it is not. A little pointless, even. But this did nothing to dampen the kids' enthusiasm for piling eggs into their new baskets.