Sleepy, Dopey, Grumpy.

Well, I have been quite a joy lately. The husband is finishing up a semester in which he has taught a night class two nights a week, which has meant he leaves just after the kids wake up and does not get home until after they are in bed. As much as I do indeed love and cherish my dear children, by Wednesday night of each week I found their every word and deed Incredibly Annoying and my ability to suppress this Extreme Annoyance was nil. I am aware that my temporary situation is a full-time reality for many women, and they have my deep respect and compassion.

The Christmas season also makes me irritable, and then I am irritable because I am irritable. It is loud in my head.

Hudson woke up this morning and was saying, "You've GOT to be KIDDING me!" about everything, which is funny in and of itself, but patently hysterical when his actual pronunciation is along the lines of, "you DOT to be TIDDEN me!" He has been doing more than his usual amount of stomping around with a scowl on his face when there is absolutely not one thing wrong, and I've heard rumors that there is some kind of testosterone surge that happens to boys soon to be four years old, and I suppose that makes good sense. Here he is with a very gun-shaped stick he picked up at the park today and brought home in his jeans pocket. He is also wearing the Daddy's headlamp:He is VERY interested in guns and knives, and has no idea what the majority of mankind actually DOES with guns and knives. Which reminds me that up until this week, when Harper would see someone smoking a cigarette, she would say, "Oh, that lady is enjoying a lollipop!" and I would not correct her, for the same reasons, I suppose, that I don't correct her when she exclaims, upon seeing the smokestacks at the refineries, belching out whatever smoky byproduct it is they belch out, "Cloud makers!! Mommy, that's where the clouds are made!!!" Anyway, yesterday she asked me what a cigarette was. And I asked her where she learned that word and she said from the book about Officer Buckles and Gloria, and he tells the kids, as one of his safety tips, to Stay Away From Cigarettes, a sentence I had skipped over when I read it aloud. Now that she can read, she is going to discover all of the spontaneous editing I do as I read. Anyway, I told her that cigarettes are tobacco leaves wrapped up in white paper and that some grownups like to set them on fire and breath in the smoke but that it wasn't a very healthy habit because our lungs don't work as well as they should with smoke in them. She wandered away at that point. Maybe to go smoke a cigarette, I don't know.

Harper has mastered monkey bars this month, and likes to use it as a verb: "Friend, would you like to monkey bar with me?" she will ask at the park. One day last week our neighbor was over to admire Hudson's drums and he asked Harper if she played any instruments and she replied, "I play piano, harmonica..." and she kind of gazed off into the distance running through the orchestra considering which others she could claim. Harper and Hudson are both infatuated with our neighbors, who are a sweet young couple, newly married. They will stand on the top of the slide peering into their back yard, sometimes singing a little ditty they like to call "Mr. Golightly! Come outside!" Only when Hudson says it, it sounds like Mistuh Dough-yite-yee. When there is a Mistuh Dough-yite-yee sighting, everyone comes running in, breathless and giddy. One day I overheard them making a list of grown-ups who are invited to our house. Mr. Golightly made the list, as did army men and ballerinas and Bear Grylls and karate men and hunters and Survivor Man. I am sorry if you are not on the list. I am not either, apparently.

Last Sunday when everyone was dressed and ready for church, Hudson made a proclamation: "The boys have to be cool and the girls have to be bootiful. That. Is. The point. That is the RULE."

Helena has reached the developmental stage I refer to as "octopus arms". She has realized there is an entire world above her head, heretofore unnoticed and she is determined to partake of it. It's hard to remember to push things out of her reach--on the table, on the kitchen cabinets, on my desk. She has also discovered that if she wants to defer the unpleasantness of a diaper or clothing change for a few minutes, she need only stand up on the changing table and wrap her arms around me for a sweet hug. I will usually stand there for a few minutes rubbing her velvet back, until the sweetness can no longer mask the stench, at which point I have to perform a half Nelson to get her in position. If only a hug could wipe away the poo. Alas.

I have decided that I can no longer hide my disdain for the Berenstain Bears books. I think it was Monday when Harper plopped down a huge stack of them and she and Hudson snuggled in and we made it through four and we were almost to the end of one about pollution and recycling and I read, "And Brother and Sister Bear realized that their Clean the Earth club blabbedy blaggedy blah blah BLAH! And they all picked up their litter and recycled and the world was TIDY and CLEAN THE END NO MORE BERENSTAIN BEARS TODAY. I'M SORRY BUT I CAN'T READ ANOTHER WORD OF THIS PEDANTIC INSIPID TEXT. I SIMPLY REFUSE!!" Okay, maybe I didn't really say 'pedantic'. And honestly, I don't mind the older ones like The New Baby and The Spooky Old Tree. But whenever they started writing Issue Books--blech, the quality of the writing is just poor. I told Harper she can read as many of them as she wants to, as long as she is the one reading them and not me. I'm sorry Stan and Jan (and Mike), I am sure you are lovely people and I'm glad you are very rich.

That will be all. I'm thinking about starting another blog to review the grown-up books I've been reading lately. Of course, I'm also thinking about learning to play the cello and mastering the art of watercolor portraiture. So. Life is short, art is long.