I am tired and my mind is not really wanting to do this writing thing. I fear that if I don’t push myself every now and again to create something more than math homework and history papers I will forget how to be creative. So…
I write snippets – fragments of conversations, silly phrases, and moments of shining brilliance – that come out of Cody and Carter’s mouths. I write them on strips of paper that reside next to the phone on the kitchen counter. I keep telling myself that I will come up with a clever way to make a blog post out of them but instead they get splattered with bacon grease, splashed by wayward milk that has more important things to do than get poured into a glass, or simply lost in the shuffle of the other bits of paper that I occasionally scoop up in a fit of cleaning and toss in the recycle bin. There are only a few remaining and I thought that perhaps I should share them with you, and at the same time preserve them for the future, before they too end up lost to a pancake batter catastrophe or an exploding yogurt container.
1 – Cody: Excuse me! I give him a funny look and ask him if he had burped or farted. He shakes his head and says, It was a silentbadeenah (when pronounced it rhymes with ” Silent I seen ya” which I know is not proper English but that is really nether here nor there in this discussion. Also when he said it, he ran all the syllables together so it was one big long gibberish sounding word.) I asked him to repeat himself at least three times but just could not get what he was trying to tell me. Finally, exasperated, he says, You know, a fart that is quiet but nasty. A silentbadeenah. Oh. Yes. A silent but deadly. Got it.
2 – me: Cody, why do you have your hand in your pants! I know this is really a question that one day I will not want to hear the answer to but at this point, I think it is still a relatively safe one to ask. He answers, I have an itch on my bladder.
3- I was making Carter a peanut butter and honey sandwich the other day (his favorite) and asked what kind of peanut butter he wanted. (At our house you are in one of two camps when it comes to peanut butter, that of the deliciously smooth or that of the nasty chunky type. Except for Carter, who likes both.) He thought about my question for a little while and then said, Momma, I would like the flat peanut butter, not the lumpy one.
4- Carter: Momma, momma! I am being an even bigger boy. I’m not even using the seat when I sit to go poop! What?!? I walk into the bathroom to discover Carter perched on the toilet, the lid and seat both up and Carter proudly taking care his bathroom needs “big boy style”. (This one was a while ago, at the end of the seemly never ending potty training days.)
5- And one last one in the form of a poem that Cody devised one weekday morning several months ago.
Poppa’s coffee begins to perk,
And Poppa will soon be leaving for work.
There you go. In between our family trip to Tucson, registering for my graduate classes, writing a history paper about the Jack Benny program, studying for the state required WEST-E test, the planning of both Cody and Carter’s birthday parties, and the writing of my third article for the newspaper, I give you this. Snippets of our lives.
