Jan
14
“What the heck are you guys doing?”
“We are COWBOYS!”
“HI MOMMY! HI MOMMY! HI MOMMY!”
“So why are you grabbing your crotches?”
“I’m not. I am breaking this horse. He’s a wild one. I had to get him with my lasso.”
“COWBOYZZ!”
“Wait, what horse?”
“The horse I am riding. We are both riding horses.”
“RIDEA HORSE!”
“I don’t understand, where’s the—ohhhhhh. Ah, okay. Well, those are some very, very tiny horses.”
“But they are wild.”
“A BABY! BABY HORSE!”
Jan
12
“Guys,” I say, as they stampede by for the thousandth time, shrieking and laughing hysterically, a blur of pinwheeling arms and legs. “Guys. GUYS.”
For a brief moment they stop and I’m reminded of the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons where the action would freeze-frame for a moment and a fake Latin name would flash on the screen—Accelleratii Incredibus—before everything would rev back up, clouds of desert dust and ACME signs and a poonk-poonk-poonk roadrunner raspberry.
Please slow down, I tell them. Someone’s going to get hurt. Stop chasing. Stop screaming. Just be careful, for god’s sake.
Dylan’s got one end of a stick horse and Riley’s got his hand looped around its fake leather bridle on the other end. One of them is pulling the other or they’re pulling each other and the game seems to involve a whiplash effect and pshew pshew cowboy gun noises and what the hell, why are all the sofa cushions strewn around the floor again and oh shit is that lamp about to fall over?
“We just playing,” Riley tells me.
“A tick! Horse,” adds Dylan, not to be outdone.
Then they’re off again, the stick banging into walls, the boys screeching, a whirlwind of chaos and activity. I rub my temples, walk to the drawer with the ibuprofen, and from somewhere down at one end of the house I hear a crash and a delighted, top-volume scream and I yell at no one: “GUYS! STOP IT!”
It goes on and maybe they eventually calm down but more typically it ends in tears, usually Riley, who refuses to take off his socks and thus inevitably slides across the wood floors and smashes into something and starts howling, and instead of soothing him or asking where it hurts I find myself barking SEE I TOLD YOU and WHY DON’T YOU GUYS LISTEN and maybe just for good measure I send them each off for time outs, because my god, my god, the noise, the screaming, jesus christ.
They play together like this every day now, and I’m so happy they like each other’s company. I’m filled to the brim with joy over our two beautiful boys, our rambunctious happy healthy kids.
But oh. Oh, oh, oh. I didn’t know how insane it would be. How it would sometimes drill right into my brain and leave me limp. How one day in the gym locker room I’d find myself watching some Maui tourism commercial that’s nothing but a scene of a nearly deserted beach, waves lapping, the quiet noises of the sea, fifteen seconds or so of this muted soft footage, and my mouth would be hanging right open, my pupils saucer-sized. Yesssssssssss.
Riley comes over to me crying about how Dylan poked him in the eye, Dylan squeaks “HUG! HUG!” with a worried scrunched-up face, Riley reluctantly hugs him, and it all starts up again. I don’t have any idea how four little feet can sound like that, like a giant stampede of prehistoric animals. Crash. Bang. Scream. Pshew pshew.
“I’m a COWBOY! No, I’m a SOLDIER! Mommy I’m the SOLDIER and Dylan is the HORSE! I’m a SKATEBOARD BATMAN!”
“Neigh! NEIIGGH!”
Guys, guys, guys! I say. What Mommy, what Mommy, what Mommy, they say. Oh, I don’t know. Let’s go look at a calendar together, and count the months until spring.
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