March Musings

On this eve of “the closest thing the Irish have to Christmas,” I’m sitting on my couch musing about my hopelessly silly kids. Nature dictates that the oldest is silly like his dad, but nurture appears to have a strong influence on the youngest. Too bad - we thought he had a chance!!!

We were out and about gathering materials for our latest home improvement project, built-in cabinets and a desk in our office (the wood floor was finished up two weeks ago). After we finished getting some things at WalMart we came across some girl scouts selling cookies. I have a soft spot for kids selling things, especially sweets, so I bought a box of Thanks-A-Lots (I think that makes 10 boxes this year). Quin has a highly developed sweet tooth and immediately started saying one of his favorite words, “Cookie.” We we opened up the box and all had one. Not more than a minute later, Quin was again repeating “Cookie, cookie, cookie!” Jenny thought he was palming it, or had just put it in his lap since very little time had passed and said to him, “no, you just had one. Where is your cookie?” Without missing a beat he leaned forward and opened his mouth and pointed to it.

His vocabulary is progressing well beyond cookie, though many of his sentences are just negative versions of things we want him to do. “No nigh-nigh” is one I hear each night before bed. He has started to branch out, though. He is very polite and frequently says things like “Thank you daddy.” One I particularly liked recently was when I was trying to give him some juice. He took one drink and said “Ucki duece.”

Not to be outdone, the older one continues to be goofy in many ways. If you’ve met Ethan, you know he is quite the talker. We’re taking a trip to Arizona next month and I’m pretty sure he will likely talk at least 20 hours of the 30 it takes to get out there… One of our recent conversations was that he hoped he would never be homeless because he didn’t want to have to bathe in the lake. He said he had heard about these fish that would swim into your penis and eat your testicles. 8 year old boys are apparently fascinated with testicles… At one point he referred to the fish as “nasty little nut eaters!”

Just today we were watching Chowder on Cartoon Network. Not a particularly good show, nor would I recommend it for your children that aren’t so demented, but Ethan seems to like it. In this episode, for some reason, Chowder had to prove that he was not a baby or something (I was barely paying attention), so he took off a towel he was wearing. Ethan started giggling and said, “he’s showing him the goods. You know… his privates.” During the same episode, some fairy things were about to kiss when Ethan announced, “Look dad, they’re going to have sex.” Well, I’m not proud to say that I was intrigued immediately, but quickly realized that Ethan thought that kissing was “having sex.” I can’t imagine what he talks about in school… For those that are worried, I did explain to him that it was not, indeed, having sex, it was just kissing. I assured him that I would tell him all about “having sex” when he was a little older and that he would think it is really gross right now… He agreed. Whew - that talk was averted for a little while longer…

That’s it for now. I wish you all a Happy Irish Christmas, as Michael Scott would say, and I hope your kids give you as many laughs as mine give me!