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Archives from 2002-2006

Dylan’s 4th birthday is coming right up (FOUR!) and I spent last night scrabbling around in some sort of endless Amazon.com rabbithole, surfing pages and pages of toys and lingering over the reviews in a futile attempt to understand how one person could say the Batcopter was absolutely for sure the best invention since the printing press while the next person vehemently described it as an utter piece of shit that was probably assembled by hallucinating orangutans. I don’t know why I even read the reviews ever, because no matter how many 5-star ratings a product gets if even one crackpot posts something about how THIS IS THE WURST DONT WASTE YOU’RE MONEY!!! I start stroking my chin worriedly and thinking, well, maybe “MJacksonfan4life” has a point.

I ended up getting him a balance bike and some sort of nightmare Hot Wheel configuration that in theory the boys can play with together but will probably just result in a lot of fighting and even more little cars all over the house, like I don’t get up their ass enough already for the constant Lego-spew. Why does boy stuff have to have so many pieces? My ideal toy would just be a big solid, silent chunk of something that doesn’t require batteries and can’t be thrown or moved around the house. Like, say, a slab of granite. Here! Happy birthday! Some India Juparana, just for you!

Anyway, FOUR, I can hardly believe it. I feel like 2011 just flew by in a whoosh of flapping calendar pages.

I put together a video of my goofball kids and I’ve been watching it over and over—not because it’s such a great piece of moviemaking, mind you, but because there’s something so captivating about seeing them through the camera lens. My brain flickers back and forth on how they look to me: so big! So little! Wasn’t Riley just a furrow-browed baby being toted around in a backpack? When did Dylan replace his round toddler belly with all those lanky limbs? (And will he ever figure out how to put on a coat?)

The other day I joked to Riley he needed to stop growing so that I could keep him this size forever, and he laughed and patted my knee. Like, for real: he patted my knee, and said, “Oh, Mom. I have to get bigger, that’s what kids do.” And then he ran off to do just exactly that.

We’ve been pretty much snowed in since … what, Tuesday? It’s all a blur. A blur of days spent mostly inside and having a lot of fun together but also maybe getting a tiny bit cabin fever-y as evidenced by the fact that my first attempt at this blog entry was just 14 consecutive pages of this:

Speaking of Jack! JB went to the grocery store last night and on his way home he called me to ask if I could put the cat in the utility room. I allowed as I could probably go ahead and do that but was there any particular reason, or was this some sort of weird sex metaphor where “cat” meant “penis” because if so I’d really need to know what “utility room” meant.

“Well, I sort of picked up one of those Jack Russell dogs. He’s in my truck right now,” JB said.

NOT what I expected him to say, by the way.

It turned out that the dog came inside the grocery store while JB was in there, the staff shooed him back out, and JB watched him wander around the parking lot for a while before he opened the truck door and the dog cheerily jumped right in. He didn’t have a collar, and some people walking by told JB they’d seen the dog off and on all day, just running around lost in the snow.

So we totally had a dog last night, which was great entertainment for the kids.

We called him Jack and briefly considered what it might be like to keep him if we couldn’t find the owners, but as well-behaved and friendly as he was, he clearly wasn’t meant to be in a house with a cat. They did have a brief truce for a while:

But 99% of the time Jack was staring intently at the cat with his entire body on alert. Tail wagging madly, but you could actually see the little pangs of frustration emanating from him. I’m not sure if he was visualizing a delicious cat risotto or if he just wanted to play or what, but I don’t think I would have left them alone together to find out, you know?

Other than being a total Cat Creeplord, Jack was the perfect overnight guest. This morning JB took him to the vet, where they treated him for an eye/ear infection and scanned him for a microchip. Thankfully, he had one, and better yet, it had been registered. JB got the owner’s address, then drove right over and delivered Jack back to his happy owner:

Man, I love happy endings, don’t you?

PS: Turns out the dog’s real name is “Blast.” Heh.

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