I Speak With the Tongue of a Thousand White-Hot Lies!

Me: Scoottt … I need the octopus chandelier!

Z:  You don’t need it–I mean, it’s cool, but kinda creepy.

Me: No, I neeeeed it.

Z:  You don’t need it.

Me:  Okay, I waaant it, really a loooottt …

Z:  (pats my leg) That’s a much better way of putting it. 

Number of Plans I Have Thwarted Today: 5 (no, you may not make a grappling hook; no you may not try to lasso things off the countertop; no, an entire day of cartoons is not a good idea; no, an entire day of video games is not a viable alternative to that; stuffed animals do not mix with the splash park.)

Number of Plans I Helped With: 2 (giant pile of blankets on the floor for video gaming comfort; trip to the splash park with Scott)

Daredevil Stunts I Held My Breath and Watched: 1 (He ran through the water feature at the park in order to gain maximum speed down and air off the end of the twisty slide. The fake grass burn on his back and arm is fairly epic; he’s pretty proud.)

I spent the morning with the kid. We went to the dollar movie showing of Despicable Me 2.^[1] They had four theaters open for this movie, and they were all full--apparently the dollar movies are very popular with the local day camps.

So there we were, watching the Minions, who speak their own little Minion-language and occasionally repeat words/sounds … and whenever they did, the kids in the audience started chanting along.

"Oooo-weee, oooo-weee, oooo-weee ..." All. Around. Me.

Then the “Happy” scene started, and all the kids sang along with the chorus.

I can’t decide if it was like a cult meeting or an elementary school version of Rocky Horror.

¹I have not, as yet, seen Despicable Me. Also, my overall review was Okay, not as good as How To Train Your Dragon 2.^[back]

The elementary school does a monthly "Parents' Night Out" event, where the kids stay at the school and play games and eat pizza and watch a movie, while Mom and Dad and whoever get to have, I dunno, date night or some such. Scott and I have a support system, so it's not something we've taken advantage of.

Last month, Z saw the prep for Parents' Night Out, noticed how much sugar it apparently involved, and asked if he could please go to the next one. So tomorrow, he's set to go and play laser tag, eat flavor ice, and watch The Croods from 3:30 - 8pm.

This is the first social/party type thing he's done without me, his father, or one of his grandparents with him.

I may be slightly freaking out.

My husband is now 42. He is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But don't tell him that; he'll get a big head.

Waiting for the family to arrive, then Jason and David. Z is currently distracted by Plants vs. Zombies on Scott's phone.

Last night was the monthly Chuck E. Cheese night for the elementary school, where they give a portion of whatever you spend back to the school. Z loves Chuck E. Cheese night. One of his little friends was there, and they ran around playing games, sharing whatever extra tickets they found, paying for each other. His friend wasn't allowed to play shooting games, and I thought this would be an issue for Z., but he just ... didn't play any shooting games.

(We don't own very many shooting games, and he doesn't play the ones we do have for a variety of reasons, so I don't get too uptight when we go to Chuck E. Cheese and he tries out the Terminator game. But I respect other parents' decisions on these things--you raise your kid how you raise your kid.)

Anyway, it was nice. We had another round of "How old is your son?" because, as usual, Z towered over his friend. There is only one boy we know who is Z's age and is taller than he is. The girls seem to be as tall as he is, but I think girls actually do grow faster than boys for a while? I remember being the tallest kid in class until about 7th grade, and being as tall or taller than a lot of boys until 9th grade. We hit high school and every guy I knew had a growth spurt. It's weird going from being called "Too-Tall" to being short.

Scott baked a Dr. Pepper cake for his birthday, and that was an adventure. It's been a while since I've baked a cake, and I don't think I've ever done one totally on my own, so I wasn't much help. One layer stayed half-in the pan. I got the other half out without totally destroying the infrastructure, so we pieced it together and Scott frosted it (I think this was supposed to be more a drizzle than a frosting, but whatever), and it's pretty good! And looks-wise, whenever Scott brings up my coco puff lump o' doom, I now have something to come back at him with.

But now I want to bake a cake myself. And we don't need another cake. And I promised Scott some hot sauce bread tomorrow as a birthday gift, so ... no cake baking for a while.

Scott is improving; Mom is death warmed over. Not sure what's going on tomorrow, yet, but I have plans and contingency plans because that's how I roll, y'all.

Today was actually nice. Also kind of not--I kept getting overwhelmed now and then by this feeling of total isolation. Which makes sense--in a country of 300 million people, I'm sure we weren't the only ones not doing the giant feast thing, but you wouldn't know it. Z. didn't seem to notice or care, so that's good. I just, every so often, thought damn, it would suck to be a single parent without family.

Anyway. The day was really, really quiet. Which was wonderful--look, I don't want my husband to be sick, and it sucks, but one thing I've learned this year is that when you're not happy with a situation there is still nothing wrong with finding and enjoying whatever you can out of it. (I'm not super-keen on my work schedule, but I am allowed to enjoy the writing time it gives me.) Usually on days when we're all in the house, there's stuff from Scott's computer, or he and Mom discussing his homework, or lots of chaos in the kitchen, along with the TV or the computer games Z's playing, and it's noisy.

Today was not noisy.

My son also listened to reason. A lot. I explained that I was going to take him to the park today, but that we should wait until the afternoon so there would actually be kids there since it was Thanksgiving. He was cool with it. He was great about going to CVS for cleaning supplies. He was great about helping me Lysol everything in sight (though I figured that would happen). He played in his room while I cleaned it and did not hinder my progress. We painted pictures, made Scott a get well card, watched TV.

When we went to the park, he was bummed because there weren't any kids there his age who wanted to play, but after some moping about it, he took me up on my offer to play. He pretended to be an alien from Jupiter and crashed his spaceship, and then we went around the playground looking for the parts he needed to fix it. Then he was a baby velociraptor who had traveled through time to hatch at the park, and his egg was a time machine. So we traveled through time to find his siblings. (Let me tell you, I am extremely happy we have reached this stage of play. I can play pretend like a mofo.)

After the park we got meat and juice and came home. We had dinner, played "Who? What? Where?"--which is basically charades for kindergarteners. My favorite of his was he had to be a dog, bowling, in an igloo. He walked around pretending to shiver and sort of half-assed bowling a ball, and when I said, "How do I know you're a dog?" he threw out this tiny, frozen, "Arf?" His favorite of mine was the Queen doing karate in a swamp. So I hiked up my "skirts," kicked stuff, did the Queen wave, and smacked my neck like a mosquito had bitten me.

When I went to clean the kitchen up after we ate, he drew me pictures--also in the kitchen. One of them was a fairly respectable crab.*

We watched some TV for couch time, and he was falling asleep on me as we read books for bedtime. He was out like a light ten minutes after he was in bed.

I had forgotten the shape of our days, back before he was in school and I was working every weekday. And this wasn't exactly the same (I would have killed for naptime around 3:30 or so), but it was nice.

*Dudes, his handwriting and drawing skills have gone through the roof since he started kindergarten. Apparently he's still not quite up to snuff with the literal writing yet--his teacher told us that it's fine and not hurting him academically, but he just needs some more practice--but as I told her, I'm really pleased at how much he's improved in a few months. I'm cool with her sending him the extra work home and practicing with him, absolutely, but damn. In addition to this, he came home with an "abstract" crayon drawing of a himself that he did in art class--the teacher was teaching them about abstract art generally, and Paul Klee specifically. Paul freaking Klee. Whose name, the Zweeble informed me, is pronounced "Clay." So I of course went and checked ... and it is. I've never been so tickled to have my pronunciation corrected in my life.

Well, just like four years ago, I will be spending the daylight hours trying to ignore the election (I voted last Wednesday), and the evening hours obsessively refreshing FiveThirtyEight and, I dunno, maybe NPR. (After the Supreme Court health care decision debacle, I don't trust CNN to not call the election for the Green Party at 8:30pm.)

The differences are, this year I'll be at work until 9, so the obsessive refreshing won't be for as long, and this year the Zweeble not only knows there's an election, he has a preference in it.

Vote, vote, vote, y'all! The Zweeble compels you!

The weather has gotten cooler, and so it's time for Team Zweeble's yearly allergy hell!

I'm sitting up listening to a sneezy boy, waiting to see if he settles back down to sleep before I turn in, sort of keeping an eye on the hurricane because I have family in New Jersey.

I think Z's asleep. I think I'm going to head to bed, too.

Keep warm and dry, out there in the world tonight.