Keep your hands to yourself

Keep your hands to yourself

This afternoon I kept hearing a strange click or rattle sound with each step I took. It was almost like have two coins in your pocket, not enough for the full jing-a-ling-a-ling, more like two dimes quietly clapping together. That kind of thing annoys me to no end and is the reason I keep a change purse in my car.

After a couple hours I of befuddlement I looked at the bottom of my shoe (checking for dog poop) and saw a solitary googly eye. I’m tempted to add one to my other shoe so if someone comes into my office while I have my feet propped up on my desk they’ll be greeted appropriately. If there turns out to be reincarnation, I really hope I don’t come back as a cyclops googly eye on some dad’s loafer.

Daylight saving time came back this week (if you disagree with my terminology feel free to click on the link for a hyper technical explanation), I’m in the camp that believes it should be daylight saving time all year. I’d much rather have it be darker later in the morning and get some sun in the evening year round. Surely the sun coming up later would at least buy parents of small children some extra sleep on the weekends. Of course this year it comes as Vera’s school is trying to transition the kids from two naps a day to just a nap in the afternoon, so we’ll see what fresh toddler hell awaits us this week. Hopefully I can get some more backyard time in at least.

In an effort to change things up for Vera at dinner on Friday I fed her some blueberries. The problem with feeding a 15-month-old blueberries is you have to cut them up, and you can’t just cut them in half, you have to cut them in quarters. If you’ve never tried slicing through a blueberry, much less quartering it, I can assure you your knives are not sharp enough. After spending twenty minutes carefully slicing five blueberries while my hungry master cried “more” she promptly took five seconds to send them to the floor, dispatched from her tray like they’d cause it permanent harm. She did eventually stop throwing them on the floor and started piling them up in the “trash” area of her tray, so I’ll take what I can get.

Vera has been getting bitten at school a couple times a week which is about par for the course with this age, our general thought was that we hoped she doesn’t become a biter. After getting bit twice in one day I asked the teacher about it and her response was “Vera will learn eventually.” She then asked if Vera and Franklin play rough at home. Apparently Vera likes bopping the other children on the head, and pushing them down and sitting on them so they can’t get up. Maybe Little Bunny Foo Foo is too violent of a song?

Last week Franklin managed to break the cold-water handle off the upstairs tub. This meant that for all of last week Franklin had to shower in our master shower and my wife has bathed Vera in the kitchen since. I bought the replacement part early last week, but I could never find the time to turn the water off to make the repair and I was paranoid that if I had the wrong part I’d end up stuck in a project with the water off on a weeknight. So I decided to wait for this weekend to do it. Needless to say I remembered that at 7:00 PM Sunday night right after I started the grill.

I decided to take the part upstairs and at least give it a good look over to see if I could satisfy myself that I had the correct replacement. It looked like I had the right part so I convinced myself that it didn’t really require turning the water off and decided to go ahead and knock it out. Like the wind I flew, dripping, down the stairs, into the garage for the water key, and out to the curb to turn the water off. Replacing the stem extender of a bathtub faucet handle does indeed require turning the water off. Also, an impressive amount of water can come with great velocity from the hole in the wall where the handle goes. As I sat wet on the edge of the tub trying to figure out what order all the little parts that came flying out with the geyser went back in the hole in my wife reminded me she was hungry. 

We’ll see what adventures the new week brings, hopefully less rain and some baseball practice. I plan to order the parts needed to finally build Franklin an honest to goodness treehouse, so I’m sure you’ll be reading about that soon enough.