Very nice

Breakfast this morning:
Henry requests toast with jelly. I slice up a banana for James. Henry immediately runs over to James's place and holds his hand out like the tax collector, demanding that he share. James resists. Henry persists. His hand is extended in front of James's nose, wherever James turns.
At last, James puts a gummed banana round into his brother's palm.
Henry crows delightedly: "He did it! He shared! James is a very nice man!"

True story

Peter reported having a conversation today with a friend about a visit by her young niece, age 5. The niece was so charmed by the friend's pets and other amenities that she declared she would like the friend & the friend's husband to be her parents, in preference to her own. When it was time for her to leave the friend's house, she told her parents that they were destroying her life.
"That's nothing," said Peter. "Just listen to this shit. The other day, Henry told Leora he wanted to kill her... with a gun. And he told me he was going to skin me and cover me with fire."
His listeners were suitably horrified.
"Where is he getting that from?" they asked, aghast.
"Beatrix Potter," Peter replied.

Not for the faint of heart.

Don't turn your back on this one

This happened while Peter was about five feet away, washing dishes.

No pictures

I've been meaning to say something here about how, despite the evidence of recent posts, our life is NOT in fact all Victorian morality tales for infants, but then we took a turn for the still-more Dickensian; we all succumbed to colds, which started out with fever & chills, developed into tubercular hacking, and in Peter's case, pneumonia. The whole, dreary, weeks-long episode appears to be on the verge of closing, although with its last gasp it apparently exhaled a noxious miasma of stomach flu upon us.  Dad used to quote a friend who said that having young children at home was like living over an open sewer, and it was amusing at the time. Just at present, however, we are not amused.

Memento mori

Last week there was a sale at Opportunity (or Oppity-Tunery, as Henry says, which sounds straight out of Mary Poppins) House: Knick-knacks half price. I went off the rails and bought four little English cottages, 25 cents apiece. They are rather crude tourist items that pander to the most spoony Anglophilia and I am absurdly pleased with them. I put them on my dresser along with my perfume, the Korean marital ducks from Tommy, the Wandering Turtles from Carol commemorating the births of Henry and James, and the Bad Thoughts Monster Susan made me. (Because I believe a high dresser is a most important platform for maternal juju.)

This morning, Henry begged me to honor my promise to test them for lead ( and that's a whole other story) so that he could play with them. I did, and they passed, so I gave them to him to play with, carefully. He got in the crib, to protect himself from James's incursions, and laid them out this way and that, chattering.
"Here are the houses," he said. "By the cemetery."
They do look like houses that would sit by an age-old, elm-spread cemetery, but surely Henry doesn't have these associations?
"By the cemetery?" I asked.
"What is a cemetery, mama?"
"Oh, it's a place where people's bodies go after they die so the people who love them can go and be near them."
Henry began to look worried. "And then they get up?"
"Well, no, when people die they don't get up again."
Worry, worry, worry. And then he said, "But isn't Daddy old? My Dada?"
"Oh no, sweetheart, Daddy just likes to say he's an old man, when he's feeling tired, but he isn't at all. He's not old."
Which seemed to do the trick, for now.

They aren't just houses, they're finger puffets.

Moving day

Thursday was a big day on the near west side; a small limestone ranch was being moved from the vicinity of Tenth and the Bypass to a snug little spot at Eighth and Oak, a block and a half west of us, to be fixed up and sold by Bloomington Restorations Inc.'s affordable housing program. Awesome!
Although it took two and more maddening hours for Henry to agree to get dressed in the first place, once we arrived at our little neighborhood park and could see the house entangled in branches at the bottom of the hill, he was hooked.

A truck, pulling a tractor trailer, pulling a house on a flatbed! So much goodness!

Chainsaw!

I like this picture of the house's determined little face, chugging gamely up the hill in spite of the gaping hole in his temple.

The truck was actually in motion here.

The whole operation was so noisy and so thrilling that Henry needed to hold my hand for anchoring.

There it goes! We had to go home to welcome our lunch guests, but we later learned that just a block away from this point, the house got enmeshed again in branches.

James didn't care so much about all the hoopla and went home early.

The house around the corner. Henry was taken, too with the little tree trimming truck following behind, dubbing it "cute."

Another great point of interest: the naked guy who came out on his porch to snap pictures with his phone. (He was, in fact, wearing pants, but Henry was mightily curious as to why he came out "naked.")

Scything down a wayward branch.

I was amused that they had to take down the speed limit: 30 sign.

What I want

Henry showed me that a cut on his thumb he has been tracking for several days has healed, leaving just a pink mark.
"I'm fine, Mama. Look!"
I became portentous. "Do you know what Henry? That is what I want more than anything else in the whole world. For you and James to be fine."
Henry submitted to a kiss. Then he said, "But Mama, don't you want a ball of yarn?"