Drops of Awesome

Laylee wants fresh water for her dandelion flower. She NEEDS clear water for her dandelion flower. The dirty water in the kiddy pool out back is completely and not even a little bit not unsuitable for the growth and well-being of dandelion flowers. Dandelion flowers must never never touch dirt.

I told her that flowers live in dirt. They love dirt. Anyway, we could just pressure wash the dandelion flowers if they get too dirty.

She is busy saving worms from being squished by the rocks under which they live. Magoo is busy taking those rocks and throwing them at the worms who have just been saved. But I’m not worried about the rocks that he’s got. He’s still, he’s still Magooly from the block.

The other night at dinner Laylee told Magoo, “You are ODD.” She then looked at me like she was gonna be in huge trouble and added, “and I CARE about you.”

At bedtime every night Laylee invents a new song which she sings in an almost silent vibrato for several minutes. Then she asks Dan and I to sing it back to her. We sing some words, making them up as we go along and she applauds our efforts.

My sister Meg thinks we sound like these guys. (Be sure to listen to This Book is So Awesome and Save Ginny Weasley. Their tour schedule is on the site and many of the concerts are free. You should go check them out if they’re coming your way. And their little friends too, particularly My Dad is Rich.)

Driving through at the bank Laylee asked me, “Where is this place?” I told her it was the bank. “This is not the bank,” she said, “This is McDonalds.”

It’s sort of like McDonalds only instead of a green plastic toy, I get a green paper stack in my “happy meal.”

Magoo recently turned 2 and I honestly feel that there’s nothing terrible about him.

He loves blankets ferociously and sleeps with 6 or 8 tucked around him like a little nest. He still has fat in all the right squidging places but is stretching upwards so that he’s beginning to look like a Real Boy.

I have a hard time recognizing him without food on his face and I’m sure he finds me similarly unidentifiable without matching food on my shoulder. He loves hugs. It’s one of his many chants. “A hug, a hug, a hug, A HUG!!!!” The others include but are not limited to:

Mo mo cheece! (more more cheese — it doesn’t matter if his last cheese was 5 minutes or 5 weeks ago, he always begins the discussion as though he had just swallowed his latest bite.)
Wook, wook, wook, wook! (LOOK!)
My BAKE-IT! (blanket)
and
I got it!

Yeah, he’s got it.

He is often very concerned and has highly expressive eyebrows.

His head precedes his feet by at least a foot when he’s running. He is always running. Unless he’s falling down.

He wants to mosh with life. He wants to experience everything.

He loves his sister greatly. He may love airplanes more. He still prays for shoes several times a day. He begs to use the potty but never goes. He uses his head to catch his fall, afraid of damaging his hands.

Hands are for scooping peanut butter and for smearing… various things.

Each night at bedtime he makes an inventory of his various visible body parts and will not sleep until all of them have been solemnly kiss-ed.

Throughout the day, he peeks behind couches, boxes and piles of laundry, looking and asking for Daddy, sure he’ll pop up at any moment and mourning his absence.

He can eat more than Dan.

He feels things more deeply than me and cries when Laylee is sad.

He is a tender little man, growing up too quickly. I felt a sweetness about him before he was ever born but I never imagined how my soul would light up every time I saw his little round face and chubby knuckles.

I know that even when all the baby fat has melted away, I’ll always be able to look into his blue eyes and see my little buddy.

Sometimes I like to play a game called “If I Were A Rodent, Where Would I Build A Nest For My Babies?” This game gets boring because the answer is always the same — out in the bamboo pile in the corner of the Daring Yard, where the garden is supposed to be.

I keep telling Dan this and he laughs and tousles my hair. “No vermin are building a summer home in our… vermin summer home.”

So, this weekend when I went to clear the pile and plant a garden, I asked Dan to first take a pitchfork and ram and twist it around in Hotel Rodentia. He swore he did this but I happen to know he doesn’t even own a pitchfork.

Today when I went to move the bamboo, I saw several worms crawl away and then a couple of tiny grey blobs with snouts and large pink feet waved at me from under a leaf! I am a rodent-phobe. I have been known to shake and cry after seeing a dead mouse within a mile of my house because a dead mouse within a mile of my house meant that a living mouse could be living under my bed and eating my brains through my ears one bite at a time while I slept.

I started to have a panic attack at the sight of these mutants but for the sake of my children, I did some breathing and positive self-talk, scooped them up onto my shovel, let the kids look at the “cute, cute adorable wittle mousies,” and then hucked them over the fence into forest.

Laylee was crushed. She said they were her pets, that she loved them and she made me promise not to throw any more into the forest so that they wouldn’t get stomped by a Bambi-deer or eaten by a tiger.

She befriended many other beasties today. A week ago she wouldn’t touch dirt without gloves on. Today she was scooping up piles of slimy worms and sorting them into family groups. She told me how much she liked helping “udders” and saving the worms by laying them out flat on the dry hot deck with their new parents and siblings to happily become worm-jerky. I gently explained that they might like it better in a bucket with water and dirt so now each family of worms is in a different cup of dirt, scattered around the yard where Magoo can never never find them.

She even brought me a slug in a cup. “He is my friend. I like him. I put him in this bucket so he can have everlasting life. That means he lives forever.”

After the rodent incident (Wikipedia thinks they’re moles), I continued to clear and rake and plant until we had a nice little garden of dirt out back. Laylee helped water the garden and then stuck the spray nozzle in my running shoe until it was completely saturated while I changed laundry loads. “I wasn’t trying to get your shoe wet. I was trying to get the ground under it wet and it must have gotten in the way.” Ya-huh? Would you like help unwedging the nozzle?

When Dan got home, she told him about ALL the pets, including the future moles we are bound to find if we ever clear out the rest of that bamboo. “Mom is not throwing any more into the forest because they are very tender to ME. They are my pets and I love them.”