Recent Random Oddities from the Frump House

Big brother walks down the hall, glancing through the open bathroom door in passing, and steps into the living room with a squinched up face, "Oh, that's disgusting!"

"What is?" I ask, just sitting down to the computer.

"Judah is playing with his bath toys in the toilet!"

Sure enough, he had his entire set of "Pirate" bath toys in the toilet bowl.

Judging by the looks of things, the pirates must have been enduring the storm of the century, because there was water all over the place.

How my mom-radar had not picked up on that kind of frivolity happening just around the corner I'll never know.

I'm just thankful the toilet was freshly cleaned, or it might have given new meaning to the term poop deck. (Sorry, couldn't resist, lol.)

:: :: :: ::

I was putting on my makeup one morning when Judah came wandering into my bathroom.

He saw me doing my mascara face while brushing the wand across my eyelashes, and after watching me for a few moments turned his head to look up at me and said, "Are you da mon-toe, mama?" (That would be monster in toddler-speak)

Not exactly what a mom wants to hear after putting on her makeup on, lol. Thanks a lot, kid.

:: :: :: ::

After putting the kids down the other night, I kept hearing what I thought was Judah calling out for me. "Mama?"

I got up, walked to his room, and found him sound asleep.

Just to be sure, I checked on big brother, too. He was out for the night.

Minutes later, after settling comfortably back in my own bed, I hear it again.

It was that sort of that feeble sounding call that I usually hear when the kids are sick in the night and call out to me, or need a drink after long since put to bed.

I got up and trudged down the hall. Both boys were sound asleep.

What in the world? I was sure I'd heard someone calling for me.

No sooner had I crawled back into bed and curled up with my book than I heard it again. Was Jericho messin' with me?

I called out, "What do you want, Jericho?"

"Mah-om" came the faint reply.

I knew it was coming from the direction of the boys bedrooms, so I got out of bed once again, and went to check on them. Sound asleep.

It wasn't even a case of Judah talking in his sleep as he is known to do. I know, because I stood in there for a few moments to see if he was mumbling in his sleep.

Turns out it was a pair of mourning doves that had nested just outside Judah's bedroom window, and the sound was a bit distorted.

:: :: :: ::

It was a long hot afternoon, and Judah wanted into brothers bedroom in the worst way in order to play with his much cooler toys. Jericho, however, wanted nothing to do with that prospect.

After listening to the obnoxiously incessant plea, "Wet me ih-ih-ih-ihn", coming from just outside his closed bedroom door, Jericho had had enough.

Through the closed door, I hear him try out the very naughty phrase, "Aw, shut your pie hole!" (Sadly, they're not perfect angels all the time, lol.)

Judah, amazed to have finally gotten a response to his nagging, stood up hopefully from where he had just been lying on the floor kicking the closed bedroom door in an annoying, little-brother kind of way.

When I glanced at his face, I saw that Judah looked bemused, as though reaching for a really great comeback. Doing this little bobble-head gesture, he yelled back through the door, "No, I Judah, Jay-co!"

:: :: :: ::

Upon arrival at our niece's recent graduation ceremony, we learned that while her mother had brought the family camera with her, Katie had left the very important camera card on the computer desk back at the house.

Since I had my camera with me, I was asked to sit up close with Katie's mom and grandma rather than in the back with my husband and our boisterous toddler Judah. (Nobody had to twist my arm!)

I had the privilege of sitting completely undisturbed throughout the entire event, taking pictures at all the perfect times, without a toddler hanging on my hip or my arm, asking me repeatedly for tic-tacs or gum or a drink, talking too loudly or needing his diaper changed at the most inopportune time (which would have necessitated having to step on at least twenty people's toes in the process of getting out of the row of seats to the nearest exit).

At the closing of the ceremony, the graduates were called up front as a group to collectively and symbolically switch over their tassels.

The young men were in their blue caps and gowns, and the young women in white. It was so neat to see these young people, many of which my husband had as students over the years, looking so mature and grown up as they symbolically switched over their tassels, beginning a new stage of their lives, and then tossing their four-cornered caps up into the air in celebration.

The students dispersed rather quickly in the large auditorium in order to find their families and friends for pictures, and the lights began to dim almost immediately.

I glanced back and noticed at least a dozen, maybe closer to 15 or 16 blue caps and tassels left behind on the steps leading up to the stage.

I stood there for a moment kind of stunned, pondering why no young women and so many young men would just carelessly let their caps fall where they may and then leave them there.

Maybe I'm overly sentimental, but I still have my graduation cap packed away in a box of high school memorabilia. You're supposed to keep them...or at the very least the tassel, so that you can hang it over the rear view mirror in your car. It's one of the unwritten rules of graduation, for crying out loud.

I was just about to write it off as another puzzling difference between the sexes, when suddenly in my periphery, I see a lanky young man loping towards the stage from the left hand side of the auditorium, and upon his arrival promptly began scooping up all of the leftover caps.

Oh, good, I thought. The guys sent someone back in to retrieve their hats.
(In fact, I got that same "all's-right-with-the-world" feeling one gets after witnessing a panicked little tot that had somehow gotten separated from her mama in the grocery store happily reunited).

To this scrapbookin' mama, things like that are of utmost importance.

I would not only want pictures of our sons in their hats, but I would want the hats themselves. Perhaps to be used to decorate the front of their high school scrapbooks, or to be made into a decorative wall hanging, or at the very least, to decorate with at the big family party following the event.

Certainly not left forlornly onstage in the auditorium.

Some of the other mom's must have felt the same way, because in the dim lighting, I saw a couple of them approach the young man and each request one of the hats he was holding.

That SO would have been me, and I felt vindicated knowing there were other equally sentimental moms out there.

It was then that I noticed that something about the silhouette of the young man holding the caps was vaguely familiar and caused me to do a double-take.

Turns out it was our oldest son Jericho, plundering the loot left onstage.

And suddenly, I felt all at once chagrined that those moms had to go claim their sons caps from Mr. Greedy-guts up there onstage, and then highly amused, wondering what in the world my nearly 12 year old son wanted them all for, lol.

I even asked him about it later, curious as to what had been going through his mind at that moment. What would possess him to run up onstage, and gather up over a dozen blue graduation caps? What did he plan to do with them?

He looked a little sheepish and admitted that he didn't really know. Apparently, he just didn't want them to go to waste.

Or maybe he just wanted to add it to his collection of other oddities.

Like the two tissue-papered cones left over from a pinata which he acquired after a recent party we attended. The same ones still rattling around in the trunk of my car.

Who can know the mind of a pre-teen boy?

:: :: :: ::

Both of our boys adore the Toy Story movies.

Jericho, wavering on that threshold between childhood and the more "mature" stage of his pre-teen years has, for the most part, outgrown the toys.

They have been bequeathed to little brother without argument or even 'reserved rights' to them, and are very happily dragged all over town with us.

But when we recently heard rumors that the production company responsible for those movies had a Toy Story 3 in the works, we had to check it out.

After a Google search which confirmed this, there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Okay, maybe it wasn't that bad, but even our "mature" son Jericho was mourning the premise of the story.

It sounds as though Woody and friends get heartlessly dumped off at a daycare center.

This after having been happily reunited with Andy in the first two movies.

Days after the news broke, Jericho commented on it again, still saddened by their choice for sequel. "I still can't believe they would do that in Toy Story 3! They're just going to end up torn up and thrown away in the day care center. They should have just had Andy's mom keep them for her grandchildren to play with."

I didn't dare divulge to him that grandchildren aren't especially easy on toys.

Or the sad and bitter end that met many of the toys still left around at my grandmas from when my mom and her younger brother were children.

How that early edition G.I. Joe figurine my uncle used to play with (which would have been worth a fortune now), met a dastardly fate when my cousin Rexie blew it up with firecrackers behind grandma's garage, and then melted one of the hands with a magnifying glass to simulate war wounds.

Naw, it's just better to let him think that toys like Woody and Buzz are all about wanting to loved and played with to the bitter end, and that drooling kids fighting over them in a daycare would be preferred far more than ending up in a dusty bin at a thrift store.