Zach is our monkey. He is a lot more physical than Matthew. He climbs on the furniture. He dances and leaps and jumps. He doesn’t walk places, he usually runs. He pulls furniture down on himself. He is very prone to injury. However, he handles injury and pain like a champ. Case in point – I took the boys in for flu shots a couple of weeks ago. I had to hold Matthew down while he wriggled and writhed in utter trepidation pre-shot and then comforted him while he sobbed post-shot. Zach, I had to hold still long enough for the needle to poke him in the arm, he glared at the nurse and said, “Hey. Ow,” got his band-aid and ran away to play.

The other evening, whilst preparing for bed, Zach had asked for one last sip of water. I was trying to hand him his sippy-cup but as per usual, he was leaping and grooving so much that I missed the mark and he got sippy-cup-spouted in the eye. This one hurt badly enough that it did warrant a big cry. He sobbed and was actually unable to open his eye for a full two minutes. In the middle of his agony, he yelled, “My eyeball is broken. I can’t see! I have a broken eyeball!!”

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We’ve continued taking swim lessons on Mondays and Wednesdays. We’ve been taking swim lessons for several months now. Somehow, by an act of God alone, neither boy has slipped and fallen in the slippery and fallery locker room…until last Monday. Zach felt not once, not twice – nay my friends – he fell thrice to the floor. AND THEN for a grand finale he somehow walk/projected himself into the open door of a locker and is now sporting a nice black bruise on his cheek.

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Matthew has a super-mondo wiggly loose tooth! That sucker’s gonna be outta there any day now. It’s one of the bottom, front two, and he already has the new ones coming in behind them, so unfortunately, his jack-o-lantern smile won’t last for long. Now, I consider myself not too squeamish. I mean, I don’t enjoy blood, I don’t seek out vomit and I’m not a huge fan of poo, but for the most part I’m down with the gory aspects of motherhood. Hmm, yeah, turns out I’m not too digging on the loose tooth thing. When Matthew pulls his tooth all the way down to his bottom lip so that you can see the tooth clinging to two last roots for dear life…I get all heeby-jeeby about it. It makes me shudder and say “blehblyeahbleueya.” (You must say it quickly and in one fell swoop while shuddering to get the full effect).

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Zach has been a total snot about sleeping lately. I don’t know what his damage is…I think, unfortunately, he may just be waking up in the middle of the night and he just lies there…Awake…Bored. This means two things: A.) He decides to spend his awakedness yelling and crying for me to come and hang out in his room, to cuddle, to sit the chair, to ANYTHING OR he repeatedly leaves the comfort of his bed and tries climbing over me into our bed so that we have to spend HOURS doing the same melancholy and utterly fatigued, frustrated march back to his room…we’ve worn down a path in the rug. AND B.) This also means that it’s probably time for him to give up his afternoon naps. This fills me with so much distress and grief that I can’t even begin to elucidate my feelings on the matter.

So, last night was one of those torturous nights of parenting where you’ve been kept up and harassed by an offspring for two hours straight in the middle, wee hours of the night and you really wonder why you ever decided to breed in the first place. Thus, this morning, we were quite tired and had slept a little later than usual for a weekday morning. I woke up to Matthew standing next to the bed. He looked down into my sleep-crustified state and grinned. He said, “Mom, are you as fine as a hotdog in a bun?”

I thought this statement quite funny and shared it with my mom later today. Not only did she find it amusing but she ‘got it.’ I didn’t know there was something to ‘get’.

“Oh,” she said, “How cute. That was his way of saying ‘snug as a bug in a rug’.”

“Huh?” I’d never thought to analyze his statement.

“Of course, that’s what he meant,” Grandmother-oh-wise-one continues, “He was speaking in a metaphor.”

Well, whatever. Metaphorically speaking, the kid’s a freakin’ genius.

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If my mommy/music-teaching/writing career(s) go(es) down the crapper, I have a back-up plan. I’m going to be a special specialist for special weather reports in the Seattle area. Today, Mike and I took my mom out to lunch. As we threw ourselves into the car to get out of the pouring rain, I summed up the weather: “Brr slash ick.” Yeah, that’s what I said. I think it really did the weather justice. I could really go somewhere with that…just where to exactly, I don’t know, but somewhere they’re in need of my weather commentary.