March 15th, 2010
Much ado about nothing
Day One of March Break started off with my husband feeding the children before he left for work. I was pleased that he'd taken the time to give them something before I came downstairs until I realized what he'd doled out: a package of Ah Caramel’s each.
Part of a complete nutritious breakfast!
(He may as well have cut lines for them.)
I put Oliver to bed the other night – read him a story, snuggled with him, tickled him a bit and then tucked him in the way he likes, so that the blankets are drawn up and tucked beneath his chin and he's just a head. (Which is what we call it, just a head, and it makes perfect sense to us, but I wonder what people would think if they heard me ask my kid if he wanted to be just a head?) I hugged him and kissed him and told him that I loved him, and he told me that I smelled like a beautiful horse.
(You know how sometimes you’re writing away and you get to a word that, all of a sudden, you can’t remember how to spell? And you sit there for a minute thinking about it really hard, because you know you know how to spell beautiful, for fuck's sake, but it doesn’t come and you end up having to spell check the word beautiful? That just happened to me.)
Anyway, so my son thinks I smell like a beautiful horse. He told the throaty server at our deli that she sounded like a man last week, too. That was a fun moment.
(not)
I got an eye snake a while back, not last week but the week before, a particularly bad one that left me feeling shitty for days. In the midst of a weak moment I leaned in to Dave, sighed and described to him how I felt like I was kind of falling apart. And that lovin' man of mine, he put his arm around me and squeezed me to him, pulled me close. And he told me not to worry, you know, that I was just getting old.
Oh yes, he did.
(I wanted to kick him in the balls, but I cried instead. 'Cause I'm tough like that.)
You know what else my husband did? I was sitting on my favourite oversized chair in the living room yesterday morning – this one, by the big window and my grandmother’s intricately carved octagonal table – enjoying my coffee and devouring the last of my book, when the sound of Dave talking to himself in the shower broke my concentration. I stared up the stairs at the bathroom door and listened, and you know what he was doing? He was imitating that buff guy from the Old Spice commercial: “Ladies. Look at your man. Now look at me! Back to your man. Now back to me! Do you want your man to smell like a sissy? I’m on a horse.”
