• One tooth, three teeth

    Beth is holding three pencil erasers in the shape of teeth. She advises me (in her typically loud fashion, as if from half way across the house) she has three toothes. Recognizing the grammatical error, I explain to her she has three teeth, not three toothes. Beth, being a relatively stubborn child, insists she has three toothes. This goes on for about a minute or so before I convince her there is no such word as “toothes.”

    Finally, she seems to be catching on, so I decide to quiz her.

    “Beth, what do you have when you have three?”
    “Three TEETH daddy!”
    “Good! Very good Beth! Now, what do you have when you have just one Beth?”
    “Two missing teeth daddy!”

  • Frustration, mommy and daddy style.

    Tonight we reached another milestone.
    We’ve crossed one more bridge for the first time.
    We can look back, but we can’t go back.
    We can only hope not to cross it again,
    or at least not very often.

    When her tower of legos unexpectedly tumbled, and consumed with the fire of extreme frustration, Beth exclaimed, “OH SHIT!!!”

    She said it with emphasis.
    She said it with gusto.
    She said it with passion.
    She said it with no shame.
    She saved it for me.

    It’s hard to be angry. I’ve said to Cheryl on several occasions that it’s tough not to swear in such situations. Nothing comes close to the necessary level of catharsis that a good dose of profanity provides. And yet. . .

    I am going to have to be more careful.

    And while it is nothing to be proud of, I must admit a dirty little secret. I laughed while typing this message. . .out of range (measured in time and distance) to an impressionable set of little ears.

  • When the little things are enough.

    Today was not a great day.

    My temperature has had more significant digits than I would like all day, and I’ve felt miserable. When my discomfort has allowed, I’ve slept. When it hasn’t, I’ve sat around in a daze. Poor Cheryl.

    While dazing, I’ve watched two movies on my computer (while Beth was watching Free Willy for the 129th and 130th time since Christmas), and two more on the boob tube. About a half hour ago I finished watching my second movie on TV (the HBO premere of Cast Away), and I was T.Veed out. I thought to myself, what the heck, I’ll plug my laptop into my USB hub and see if anything works. Sadly, this kind of thing serves as entertainment around here even if I’m not sick. Anyway,I unplugged my iMac from the hub and connected the hub to my iBook. I grasped my spiffy mouse (the one that has a light instead of a ball underneath), and I moved it around my desk (the mouse, not the hub or my iBook). Sure enough, the cursor on my iBook moved with the mouse. Furthermore, all of the buttons (including the scroll wheel) actually worked as well. This mouse needed a special driver from Microsoft for all of the buttons to work with my iMac, but not so with the iBook running OSX! Whew, O.K. catch your breath. I know that was a lot of excitement, but there’s more. I turned on my new printer and I gave it a whirl. Wiz bang, it printed! I must admit that this wasn’t entirely a surprise, my computer automatically looks for software updates from Apple once a week, and one of the things it downloaded recently was a driver for my printer – but I didn’t have to do anything but let it do its thing.

    O.K., I’ll admit that this is not the stuff of epic poems. No one will be casting Mel Gibson to star in the three hour movie. But this is kind of the point. It was kind of a rotten day, and all it took was a silly mouse and printer to work like they should to make my day.

    Funny how things work, isn’t it?