Just Another Normal Day
"I love ya, baby," I say with my very best old Southern accent. Gloria raises an eyebrow as she comes into my study. I give her a big hug and whisper "Thanks for going out on a night like this and getting me two tacos. Just the regular size, with the fire sauce, a large Diet Pepsi, and then come on home to Big Daddy.""I don't think so," she says, walking out to watch All My Children.
"Sure, go on, you bra-burner," I say. "Go sit with the rest of the bra-burners so you can sit around and talk about--"
"Burning bras?" she asks.
"A bra-burner AND a smart talker," I say. Gloria tosses her hair (she can do that, just like on t.v.) and walks out.
The feud started earlier today...
I was absorbing the worst ass-beating in the history of Candyland. Eli 3.5 loves to play Candyland, mostly because he never loses. Candyland is a color-matching game where you draw a card (red, yellow, green, orange, purple, blue) and then move your token to the next square of that color on the board. The characters that populate the game board are real freakshow personalities: Lord Licorice, Mr. Mint, Princess Frostina, King Kandy--and the expression on their faces says that Candyland takes place inside a mental institution. Basically, each of these psychopaths have a card in the deck, and if you draw it, you get sent to a designated spot on the board inside their diseased domain. I'll be thirty spaces ahead and then I'll draw the Colonel Lardbutt's Tar Pit card, which sends you back fifty spaces. There's a huge stack of cards that you can draw from, and only six 'specials,' but I always draw them, and in defiance of all probabilities, I always seem to go backwards.
So I'm playing this game with Eli 3.5, and I draw THREE specials in a row. Every one sends me further back on the board, and after the third one, I do what any normal person would do: I count the deck.
"What are you doing?" Gloria asked.
"Sixty-four cards and only six specials. And two had already been drawn. Even allowing for the reduced size of the deck as cards were drawn, that was at least a thousand-to-one shot."
Gloria's staring at me.
"I shuffled," I explained. "That was totally random."
She's still staring.
"What? Don't tell me everyone wouldn't do that if they drew three in a row."
"Okay, I won't tell you," she said lightly. "But you are such a geek."
Later in the afternoon, Eli is sorting his pictures. When he was version 1.8, I gave him one of those little disposable cameras to use on our walks so he wouldn't get bored. He had no idea what he was doing, at first, but he liked clicking the shutter button. One day, though, he saw a rabbit, and he carefully lifted the camera up to his face and looked through the viewfinder.
"Do you see the rabbit?" I asked.
"I do," he said, and so he did. He took the picture and the rabbit was right in the center. He wasn't even version 2.0 yet. Over a period of about six months he took dozens of pictures, mostly of neighborhood animals, and he still keeps them all in a box.
Once in a while, he likes to sort them, and that's what he was doing in the living room. He also likes to toss them around, and he was doing that, too. He threw about five pictures on the floor and Gloria said "Eli, please don't do that. Now they're all over the floor."
This was Parental Hyperbole, a management tool, at its finest.
Eli 3.5 looks at her very carefully and said, quite politely, "Mommy, it's not ALL the floor."
I burst out laughing, of course.
"Be quiet," Gloria said.
"Oh man, you just got SCHOOLED," I said.
"Shut up."
"BURN!" I said in my best Kelso impersonation.
Eli doesn't know what any of this means, but he's laughing at us anyway. He does that.
Just another normal day. At our house, anyway.
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