My Son is Grody

Imagine the scene: Cal and I are in a stall in the co-ed changing room of the swimming facility where he's been taking lessons for nearly two years now.  Cal is standing on the bench in the stall, and I am standing next to him.  From out of the blue, Cal situates himself on the bench on all fours (his four) and starts growling.  It's that deep, terribly gutty growl that he does when he wants to imitate a T-Rex (or a lion or other fierce animal that growls)... the one that has, on occasion, scared his sister.  I doubt many people can growl like Cal does - he's pretty good at it.

So anyway, after a few seconds, the growling comes to an abrupt stop when I notice that Cal has thrown up (puked, not quite hurled) onto the bench and a corner of his towel.  It's not a lot, but it is a little concerning.

This was a scene from our morning yesterday... a little snippet of life with my eldest Leatherkid.

"Are you okay?!?!!!" I asked him as soon as I saw the puke.

"No," he responded and just left it at that.  He seemed okay to me.

Clearly I needed to probe more.  "Do you feel sick to your stomach?!?!!!" I asked.

"No."  Okay, well that's good.

"Well, what happened then?!?!!!  Why'd you throw up?!?!!!"

"Because I was trying to get something out of my throat," he told me.

Having heard the pre-puke growls, I had a different theory of my own and voiced it.  "No, Cal, I think you threw up because you were growling so hard."

"No, I had something in my throat!" he insisted.  His face told the real story - he was making this explanation up.  The kid will not be able to tell a lie and get away with it.

"No, I think it's because you were growling so hard," I told him very pointedly and then proceeded to help him get out of his suit, which turned out to come in handy - I mean, I needed to clean the growl-induced puke up with something and couldn't use the unscathed part of the towel which we needed to get him dry.

As I helped dry him off, I told him he needed to settle down and what he had done was gross.  The word "gross" had barely finished rolling off my tongue when I reached for his t-shirt to help him get that on (seriously, Cal is pretty useless when it comes to getting dried and dressed after swimming) and noticed that the chest of it was caked with Cheeto juice (which is the dust from Cheetos mixed with the saliva on his fingers that had grabbed them) left over from the day before.

"Cal!  You are SO GROSS!" I exclaimed.  "That's disgusting!"  And then I proceeded to lay into him about not using his shirt as a napkin, a plea I've made many, many, many times before.  "It's GRODY, Cal!" as if he even knows what "grody" means but could clearly figure it out.

He grinned as I insisted that he just put on his coat over his bare chest.  "Without a shirt?" he asked me, confused.  I couldn't tell if it was going to bother him but secretly hoped it would.  Turns out it didn't.  Nope.  Pants with pockets, strings, buttons and zippers... pants that hit the tops of his feet... shoelaces that don't lie perfectly... socks that don't go up to his knees and stay tight... these things bother him, but a sticky coat on bare arms did not.

"I'm not letting you put that shirt back on!"  He was NOT going to wear that shirt... that Cheeto-juiced, grody shirt.  And then I picked up his wet bathing suit and wiped his puke off the bench with it before we exited the stall.

Ella "Got" A Spider This Morning

In Ella's world, the number of creatures that fall in the category of "spider" is much bigger than those that actually are spiders.  Flies... ants... even small, shredded pieces of bark have been mislabeled as "spiders" by Ella.

So when Ella came to our room this morning and announced that there was a spider in her room, I knew it could really be any number of things.  I amused her by listening to her remarkably long story about it (something about waking up and seeing it and being scared but not being scared and then what seemed like million additional details that I heard but didn't really hear).  It was a typical Ella story - the girl can talk... about anything... A LOT.

Anyway, after the excruciating level of detail came to an end, she asked me this, "Can I use a wipe to get it?"

Apparently, one of those million details was that she wanted to "get" it, which, and I'm not sure that she realized this, meant that she wanted to kill it.  In my 40+ years, I've learned that no spider survives being picked up by a tissue... or in this case, a wipe.

I, of course, told her that, yes, she could use a wipe to "get" the spider.  At least she asked.  Many a time I've picked up a full pile of dispensed, unused wipes left behind by my unruly kids.

With the approval to "get" the spider with a wipe, Ella darted off to her room as Dan and I continued to get ready for work.  She returned a couple of minutes later and proudly showed us her victim.  In her hand was a wadded-up wipe.  She held it out and unraveled it to reveal the spider that she had "gotten."  It was one of the small, shredded piece of bark variety of spiders.

Dan and I both praised her for her achievement -- afterall, I know there are plenty of adults who are afraid of spiders, whatever kind they may be.  Dan said something to the effect of "nice job... you got one of its legs," which I found to be pretty funny -- did he not know that she technically did not "get" (any piece of) a spider?

I never did call him on it and see if he knew it wasn't really a spider -- there really was no time.  That we managed to stay engaged in Ella's getting of the spider amid the mad rush to get ready and out the door this morning was almost as impressive as Ella getting the spider... or whatever it really was.