A day in the life of the Deuce

Today Deuce and I went shopping. He was okay with it for the first few minutes, but by the time I had him carrying around swimsuits in Banana Republic, the demasculinizing had set in...

"Momma, I don't wanna carry your panties any more."

"Deuce, those aren't 'panties'. It's a swim suit."

"Whatever they are, I'm tired of carrying them." And he began hanging them from every mannequin in the store...

It was at this point the sales clerk started dieing laughing and had to run to the back room. I tried to explain to him it was no different than what he wears to the pool, but the glare he gave me with one eye brow raised was just all too close to home.

So we left.

On the way home, he fell asleep. When he abruptly woke, he said, "MOMMA! I KNOW HOW TO RIDE A BIKE NOW!"

Just imagine my confusion when I'm taken from enjoying classical music and being lost in my thoughts to that statement...

"Momma, I had a dream that I was learning to ride a bike and now I know how! Let's go home and take off my training wheels!"

My neighbor, the one I lovingly call The Bitch, tried to convince me that my son may very well be some sort of prodigy who could will himself to learn to ride without training wheels unassisted.

So when Dorkfish came home from work, he removed the training wheels, put on the kid's helmet and helped him balance. Slowly, he removed his hands from the seat of the bike and with a huge exhale, sent our youngest bear off into the wilderness...

Where he promptly fell off the bike and cried.

So, the lesson to learn here is that when your child dreams they can do something, you should do everything in your power to assist them in their goals. Just make sure you hold back the laughter when wiping their tears.

Honestly, I'm just thankful he didn't have the 'naked' dream.

Thank goodness she's not a runner...

After the Great Mams Adventure where she came to visit and was stuck here for a month, she finally volunteered to return. Yes, I fully took advantage of her senility and never mentioned it had only been a couple of weeks since I had taken her home.

Hush.


However, once we got to Tennessee, Mams decided she would just enjoy our visit there and not return back to North Carolina after all. Surprisingly, duct tape is more difficult to get off of 84-year-old skin than one would imagine.

But she's really enjoying her visit with us this time! She's helping the boys learn their words by making these big signs of the 'word of the week' and pasting them in her bedroom window. Apparently, the word of the week is "HELP". She's also been insisting on trying to get the mail so she could 'make friends with the mail lady', but I've been keeping her in the house so she doesn't fall down the front steps. I'm sure my 'assisting elderly' badge will be here any day.

I do have to admit that I'm tired of untieing the bedsheets. Although, she is getting good at making rope ladders out of them! Who said little old ladies only crochet?!

The Truth Fairy

Bonus finally lost his first tooth.

Well, technically, he didn't "loose it" so much as I convinced him that my friend Carrie was a dentist and therefore was fully trained on the fine art of tooth removal.

He did look a little concerned when she shoved a paper towel in his mouth and considering she had just been holding rabbits in the back of her pickup truck, I didn't blame the kid. (Yes, I miss my Tennessee life...)

In researching the current compensation for a tooth, I've found that you people are crackers. There is no way my kid is getting up to $10 per tooth. Hell, I'd already decided he was lucky if he got more than that handful of change I dug out of the couch last week when he thought dumping his piggy bank out on was a good idea...

(And yes, I fully planned on using his own money for the tooth fairy crap as I have been the one picking up coins for days.)

But then I came up with a great idea.... I wrote a letter from the tooth fairy to go under his pillow:

Dear Bonus,

I am so proud of you for being such a big boy and loosing your first tooth! Congratulations! The current rate is $1 per tooth, despite what your friends may tell you. Also, your girlfriend who said that 'when you loose your first tooth you get the Barbie you always wanted' was lying.

I have heard that you are trying to save up money right now to replace your bike tire that you flattened with a drill bit "just to see what a flat tire looked like". Considering you haven't been doing the chores your mother requested in order to earn that money back, I've decided to just give the dollar to your mother to help offset the cost of this new tire.

Maybe by the time your next tooth falls out, you will have worked that off and will actually get the dollar yourself. (You know, your mom only got a quarter when she was a kid...)

Best wishes and happy dental health,

The Tooth Fairy



Genius, right?! It's all sorts of parenting gold. Aside from keeping the fantasy going, he's getting a little lesson in the process!

Dorkfish refused to let me do it. He insisted it would 'scar the kid for life' or something.

These people just don't get my humor...

She likes the booooys in the baaaand....

Straight out of The Never-Ending Vacation, my grandmother is here for yet ANOTHER week. This weekend it snowed for the third weekend in a row in a city that rarely sees any of the white stuff. Not only is she insisting that she will never return in any cold season, she's pretty convinced that this might be a sign of the apocalypse. (And she says she's being punished for some bad deeds of which she will not speak.)

However, in the car today, she asked to hear the song I had played yesterday, "Super Freak" by Rick James. Her favorite line is "The kind of girl you don't take home to mother". Not only does she sing the chorus, she giggles at the same time...

Heh.

I'm starting to see a connection here; maybe she IS being punished.

Either way, she's my all-time favorite.

It's all about the magic.

Two days ago, I woke up with an incredible soreness in my gums, behind all my teeth. After consulting Dr. Dorkfish who diagnosed it as eating soup that was too hot the night before, I inspected them in the bathroom mirror. Just a little redness, nothing serious.

The next day, they're worse.

And there were red and white patches.

And I started feeling achy.

(Just to clarify, I've never even had so much as a canker sore in my mouth so this new revelation took me back to a conversation with a friend my freshman year in college which involved a "what does this look like to you" discussion. Poor, dumb, girl....ahem.)

So I call Dorkfish home from work and make him take me and our three year old to the doctor. Deuce had been complaining of an ear ache for three days now, so I figured we'd make it an all-skate.

The doctor looked all inside my mouth and asked me if it hurt to pee.

*blink*

Seriously, did it hurt to pee?! Listen here, Jackass, if it was THAT, I wouldn't be sitting here with my husband AND kid nowwouldI?!

He decided it was a mystery virus. Nothing they can do for it, but come back in five days if it's not better. (Google could have done that for me and the co pay would have been much more reasonable.)

So he sends me home with a prescription for a numbing mouthwash called, "Magic Mouthwash"....

The directions on the bottle say, "Swish and Spit".....

I'm now wondering how much that little bottle would go for on the local college campus?

By the way, Mams keeps calling it "Trench Mouth" which is not at all helping the pain....

There's a short line between 'smart' and 'dumb'.

Thanks to the Great Snow Storm of 2010, mams has stayed an extra week with us. She wasn't exactly pleased with this plan, but never the less, she's here. This weekend, they are predicting MORE SNOW! FREEZING RAIN! AND ICE! To an 84-year-old woman this is like a run in her favorite panty-hose on the way to church... completely unacceptable and a true sin.

Today, I fully planned to rush her home and come back tomorrow in an attempt to please her (so there would be a little hope of her returning at some point) and to beat the bad weather home. After all, the only way I'm getting trapped in a snow storm is if Jim Cantore is keeping me warm...heh.

Ahem.

So, she broke down and decided to stay another week with us. As a thank you, I drove her back to the mall (for the second day in a row) to purchase a skirt she had seen on clearance yesterday. F0r those of you who don't know me well, a pointless trip to the mall is about as close to torture as I can imagine. However, when your grandmother offers to stay, you'd drive her to the moon to keep her happy. (But I may have considered leaving her when she criticized the size of my rear in a pair of jeans.)

When we got back, she began feverishly cleaning the house in an attempt to get it all 'tidied up before Dorkfish gets home' because apparently, 'a man likes his home neat and clean when he gets home'...

*blink, blink*

Yeah, there might be a little bit of a generational gap there...

But I will hand it to her, the place is pretty spotless. Although when I called her a smartass for making fun of my lack of cleaning abilities, she said, "If I was a smartass, I'd be sitting in there watching TV. It looks like I'm a dumbass to me."

(smartass)

There's just no pleasing some people...

In only the second time since I've lived here in North Carolina, we got a decent-sized snow storm. It wasn't quite the snopocolypse that everyone on twitter was forecasting, but the inch of ice made the seven inches of snow a bit more treacherous.

I was pretty excited as this forced my grandmother to stay another week. She, on the other hand, was none too pleased to be stuck here. Despite my attempts to make her stay as comfortable as possible, she's already hitting up my friends of a ride back to Tennessee. I'm kind of at a loss as to how to please her... We moved the TV into her room (along with the children that watch it), I've only let her cook meals that she's insisted upon making, (yes, she DID insist. It's the sink that she's chained to, not the stove), she's called all her old friends who she can't call from home since it's long distance from her house and she's even had time to work on her medical degree, (she's diagnosed my oldest son with ADD and my dog with diabetes.)

Overall, I would have assumed it was a great trip! That was until we had this morning's conversation as she was unloading the dishwasher and I was sipping my coffee:

Mams: "There must be a reason I'm stuck here because I've been praying for the Lord to find me a way out of here for days now and he's just not doing it."

Me: "You're praying to go home?! Is it really that bad here?"

Mams: "Well, it's one of the things I pray for. You know, world peace and do get back to Knoxville."

*sigh*