Gifts, Poetry and Cake

I've had a lovely day -- breakfast with my friend Jenni, flowers from those neighborhood cuties above, and a coconut cake that I bought myself in the late afternoon. Henry surprised me with a card and an apple, carved into a swan.

Who knew?

Oliver gave me the most beautiful blue reclining Buddha. Here it is in front of my friend Moye's gorgeous pottery:

I posted both the apple turned swan and the Buddha on Facebook, and Heather McHugh -- that angel saint poet who gave me the respite week last year and who is the founder of Caregifted -- wrote a comment that is a poem. Honestly, I am in awe and so honored. Here it is:

amazing how much they have in common, the swan and buddha, in these iterations... but though the steadiness of the buddha's eye is to live for, the seediness of the swan's eye is to die for.

Wow. Right?

And then someone left this link on my last post which I believe is perfectly suited to a person who was born in 1963.



So, there you go. Gifts, poetry and cake -- I am rich indeed.

Riding in Cars with Boys, Part 43

I'm so grateful to have these boys. It's been my experience that boys are -- well -- simple. Today we drove about the neighborhood, doing errands, shooting the shit or breeze or what have you. Hey, Oliver! I said, Who do you want to invite to your poker/blackjack party? Since Oliver got back from camp, he's obsessed with playing blackjack, wants one of those poker sets and in an attempt to keep him happy and engaged with his friends from his old school, I came up with the brilliant idea of a small party. He loves the idea. We can have a bunch of guy food, I added, picturing buffalo wings, chips, something fried. I miss throwing kid parties -- it was something I did with a wild abandon when my three were younger. I'm not kidding. I love a theme, too. What do you think girl food would be, Henry wondered. He might always be thinking of girls. Probably gummy penises, said Oliver, and they both started cracking up while I narrowly avoided swerving into oncoming traffic and screamed.

This happened, part two

Oliver the Decorator Extraordinaire coaxed his brother awake this morning and up onto the roof to hang lights. I took one look and left in my car, hell bent on returning the reindeer head that my mother had broken with her cane and my father had fixed with superglue, a fool's errand I was particularly grateful for as it prevented an early death. Mine, that is. (Relaxxxxxx, Mom! I was told as I screamed good-bye and told him that I loved him).

Halloween Fixings and the Death of Twinkies

The only way Oliver and I could entice Henry away from the television yesterday afternoon was by appealing to his manly strength.

Only you can drive these stakes into the ground, Henry! we both said.

He obliged.

There was some good-natured banter between them that I was tempted to record as it's so rare these days. There was also the usual bickering.

I took a couple campy shots of Oliver, pretending to be dead in the graveyard. With a black and white filter, they were almost too creepy. The two of us went to Spirit, the grotesque all-things-Halloween store that pops up in our neighborhood once a year. We bought some more spider webs and walked around creeping each other out. There were horrible zombies and spiders that jumped out at you. There were nasty, nasty costumes and entirely inappropriate sexy Halloween costumes. The guy who was stocking the store was creepy, too, and I wondered whether they did background checks on the workers and then wondered why I would think that anyway unless it was true (a psychic hit?). There's so much shit in a Halloween store and so much shit makes me so weary in that bone weary way. Doom.

I sort of hate Halloween, but I cheerfully oblige my children's love of it.

So, Halloween is up chez House of Crazy. I've been for a walk already today and done a lot of housework and paperwork. An old friend sent me a grainy photo of a large group of girls -- a sorority photo -- from our days at UNC. She asked me who the girl to the right of her was, and the name came to me in one instant. I am finding this recall very weird today. Why is it that I can't remember the name of the book I'm reading but was able to look for one moment at this girl's face -- from nearly thirty years ago -- and know it? What the hell is that all about? These are the questions that creep out and try a woman's soul.

Good lord, part two and parenting for cash

I heard a couple of punches fly and then Oliver came into the kitchen and put an icepack on his arm. I hated to, but I asked him what happened and he told me that he'd been beaten to death, again. I made inquiries and understood that spit had flown previously to the punch.

Here's what I said,

From now on, if a punch or spit flies, I get $5. Effective immediately.

I stood there, in the doorway, and collected $15.00.

Not a bad day's work.

Reader, tell me your effective parenting strategies. I'm all ears and filled pockets.

FGS

So, Sophie has started drinking a bit better, but now she's having laughing seizures. They're called gelastic seizures, and  hence a clue to the title of this blog post. Sophie goes through weird periods where she has them off and on for days, so I'm thinking that the refusal -- or inability -- to drink is also neurological. It would be nice if when she broke out into a huge smile and then a cackling laugh, our hearts would be lightened. But, there's something faintly gruesome about the laugh and the smile -- Wikipedia likens the sudden laugh or smile to being sardonic rather than joyful -- so my smile is perhaps strained, and the boys generally look away.

Here's a second clue to the title: I'm sick to death of seizures and thinking about what to do about them. First person to guess what the title stands for gets my copy of War and Peace when I'm finished reading it. Don't knock yourself over.

Two days left of school,

and a bit of fore-shadow for the summer:

I had no part in these shenanigans, except actually giving birth to their creators. The rather large one in the too-small ski jacket and helmet with baseball catcher kneepads was the egg parent, if you remember -- further reason that the French need to do all the teenage parenting.

And there's no point to this post other than to show you a glimpse of what boys do when they're happy and not fighting for real. They asked me to film them tackling each other. Then they climbed on their bikes to have a joust with bats, but I had to go inside for that one as I didn't want to see any heads roll.

Boys

Boys! What is going on? What are you doing? I yelled out the window, yesterday, like a fishwife. The ruckus was incredibly loud.

Henry said that he was making a stick pointy with a sander:

Oliver, dressed like a SWAT officer was jumping on the trampoline with his friends:

I love boys. They're just so simple, really.

What's going on at your house?

This is supposed to be funny --

I was lazily watering the flowers in the backyard just now while talking on the phone to a Relative about another Relative's upcoming surgery. There's lots of drama in families, mine included. I tend toward the contrary, so when someone is freaking out, I'm calm. I'm calm. While I was calmly talking to The Relative, bloodcurdling screams came spilling outdoors, emanating from Oliver who claimed to have been stabbed by a pencil by Henry. Henry followed closely behind yelling that it was an accident. I turned off the water and held the phone at my ear with my shoulder and bent down to look at the stabbing -- a tiny, bleeding pinprick in Oliver's finger. It was a lead pencil! he screamed, Is it going to poison me? Henry looked worried. I couldn't hear The Relative anymore over the phone so I excused myself and pulled Oliver inside to check out the wound in the bathroom. For the next five or so minutes, I tried to remove the tiniest of gray splinters from the tiniest of wounds to the tune of the loudest of screaming and carrying on about evil brothers and homework due and on and on. I remained calm. In my mind I looked like the above fantastically attired woman, a photo that I've been dying to use in a post so here it is.