Dining with Squirrels

My counter is covered in scraps of paper.  They are my heritage and they are making me insane.  But the deterioration of my frontal lobe forces me to write down everything.  I am collecting myself on scraps.

One of the things I jot down is stuff Ben says.  It’s a sort of demented babybook, a scrappy diary.   I have a small stack of yellow and blue post-its with oddball non sequiters from my reading son.  Yesterday, he said to me “I wish we had a house designed by the bloke that designed that Meyer house.”  That bloke is Frank Lloyd Wright and I had pointed out one of his Grand Rapids creations to Ben a few weeks ago.  Bloke.

A few weeks ago, he said to me “I wanna grow up to have a job that really pays off – not like working at Chili’s.”  I struggled to place this one in context and think I finally came up with it.  My neighbor served on the jury for a murder trial and came over to tell me about the case and her experience.  The husband of the murdered woman was exonerated because he worked at Chili’s and their computerized time-cards were irrefutable. Sounds like it paid off for him, but apparently Ben does not agree.

Last month, we had this exchange at home:

Ben:  I wish we were in a fancy hotel.
Sara:  Why?
Ben:  I just like fancy hotels.

Couldn’t get another word out of him.

Last night, Lucy and I were doing tag-team showers and I came backing out of the bathroom in the altogether as she came running in, nudiepatootee.  We collided and Ben yelled “Naked ladies meet!”  I instantly imagined one of those black and white captions from a silent film.

My favorite came before Halloween.  It’s special because he almost never says it:  “I love you mommy.  I’m so glad I have you as a mommy.  You’re a good mommy.”  I was not buying him ice cream at the time. He did not follow this with a request for more screen time.  He just said it.  Ahhhh.