Every night before he goes to bed, and each morning before he leaves for school, Bennett asks me to style his hair like Elvis. I'm not sure if he's aware that I can barely pull my own hair into a ponytail w/o looking like I did it with my feet, but he seems to place enormous of trust in me. Besides, if I don't intervene, he breaks into my bathroom and uses buckets of my product on his head. So, intervene I do. He sleeps almost sitting up, so as not to mess his hair. And he sits like a statue in the car in the morning -- same reason. Whenever we're out and about, he points out hairstyles that he likes... it's really something of an obsession.

This morning in the NYT Sunday Styles section there was an article about tween boys using all sorts of body and hair products.. I showed it to Bennett because there was a picture of two boys doing their hair w/the story. M didn't approve -- thinks I'm encouraging vanity. But, as I argued, for these tween boys, the styling is all about girls.. and maybe a bit of vanity. For Bennett, at this point, he's just expressing himself. (Sort of like when he insisted on wearing a blue blazer to school all last year.) Girls have nothing to do with it, and neither does vanity. He just wants to look like Elvis, and who doesn't. Besides, if I told him that by doing his hair he'd get the girls' attention, he'd stop in a heartbeat. Girls. Blech.

Elvis is in the building..

I'm hardly one to go on and on about living in the moment. In fact, I can usually be found rolling my eyes when someone else does. But given that has been a particularly harrowing week, the kids often remind me that sometimes I just need to be a bit more... ugh, I'm about to say it.. present.

Short story: death in the family. Couldn't fly overseas to the funeral for obvious reasons and have been trying to grieve long-distance. Because life goes on, there's still work, carpool, lunches, that all require immediate attention. In other words -- little time for some necessary wallowing. I've talked about it with the kids, and they've each said some rather cute things.. but it has been the small things they do that have made me smile.

Bennett discovered Elvis a few weeks ago. Actually, I made the introduction, and it was love at first listen. And then sight. He's watched videos online, and memorized what he thinks are the lyrics to some of his songs. This morning he asked me to give him "Elvis hair" and handed me a comb and a bottle of hair gel. So, with minutes to go before it was time to leave the house, I styled a little pompadour on this head (luckily for him, he has perfect King hair) and off he went.

Usually when the boys get in the car, they spend the first 5 minutes or so beating the crap out of each other. They, they quickly calm down. It's really something of a routine. But today vanity won out and he sat straight as a pin, so as not to upset the 'do. A perfectly civilized car ride. Perhaps a first for us.

When he came home he made me fix his hair again. And the whole episode, including watching him grin as he examined the finished product and reach for his guitar, put a much needed smile on my face.

Thanks Elvis. Wherever you are.

Bars...

While I was in the UK, on a 4 day solo voyage, people kept remarking on my FB updates -- especially those about the kids. One relative said, "It's wonderful! You're so entertained by your children."

Am I? Sometimes I am. When I find Fiona sitting naked on the kitchen floor, scooping cake batter out of a bowl with her toothbrush (I'll never know how she got it down from the sink), I'm certainly entertained.

Other times I'm not so sure.

Last night M and I came home from a supremely hot date night -- sofa buying. We were greeted by some garbled tale from the babysitter -- something about a chess game gone awry, and one of the boys (unclear which one) being thrown against the bedroom window. Some part of the window came loose (unclear which part), and thankfully, the bars we installed when we moved the boys upstairs prevented whichever boy it was, from falling out of the 3rd story of the house.

I always felt those bars made the room like like a cell in juvey... which is where these boys might end up anyway. Now I know they were a smart move. Ugly, but smart.

Needless to say, I'm not feeling particularly entertained at the moment. We still can't get a clear picture of what happened from the boys, and for some reason the sitter has more loyalty to them than to us, because she's not much help either. I lectured them for a good 15 minutes, and when one of them spilled a glass of water all over his breakfast, rendering the whole plate a soggy mess, I threw the whole thing in the sink and yelled a bit. At which point Bennett announced, "I thought you said if we let you nap yesterday you wouldn't be cranky today." And so I did.

Burial behavior

M's grandmother passed away last week in Denver and instead of driving to Portland for Thanksgiving, we boarded a plane for Colorado. This wasn't the first time a great-grandparent has died, but it was the first funeral the boys went to. We didn't discuss it much beforehand. It seemed to the right thing to do - send the boys (5 and 7), leave the girls (1 and 3) at home. I told the boys what to expect, they asked questions... nothing out of the ordinary.

I don't know if this happens at all funerals, but in Jewish funerals the family and close friends of the deceased (I almost wrote victim, which means I've been working a little too much) shovel dirt onto the coffin once it has been lowered into the ground.Turns out, my boys got into a bit of a pissing match about who could shovel more dirt. This would have been enough of a challenge had Efram not accidentally (we'll never really know) shoveled a heap of dirt onto Bennett's dress shoe. Nobody touches that boys' fancy clothes and walks away unscathed.

M said he thought they started to go at it graveside. I'm not sure how he distracted them ... but he did get them home in one piece. Given that Bennett has been asking lots of questions about being buried alive, I think Efram got off easy with just a scrape.

The plumber cometh...

Of course, it wouldn't be a weekend in this house if we didn't have some sort of plumbing emergency. According to M, this plumber had a butt crack that would make the San Andreas Fault jealous... I managed to avoid him, and didn't go near the basement until the crap was cleaned up. This week's culprit: dental floss and (again) wipes. I suppose it could be worse. They could have tried to flush Fiona down the toilet.

Getting out of hand.

This morning we solved the mystery of the strange smell that's been coming from little Francie's underwear drawer. As Francie herself suspected, one of her brothers had been peeing into it. I confronted both suspects and was told that it's easier to pee into the drawer than to use the toilet b/c using the drawer doesn't require them to flush or wash.

Nice.

Unfortunately I burst out laughing when they told me. Impossible to keep a straight face. I did want to strangle them... don't get me wrong. But the whole damn situation, the fact that every room in this house has turned into their own personal urinal is just so bloody comic.

M wasn't as amused. For a few minutes I was sure that Efram would be spending the next few nights camped out on the side of a highway. Pissing rain and all.

Finally putting pen to...

It may not be paper, but at least it's more permanent than my FB status updates. I only worry that now that I've committed to this, the kids will stop providing me with material. They'll wake up tomorrow and be... like everyone else's kids. They'll use toilets, rather than holes in the garden and the corner of the toyroom behind the TV. They'll refrain from rifling through my medicine cabinet and I'll no longer be able to walk in on them swabbing their ears with a tampon. I won't find bits of breakfast and dinner stuck under the table top... weeks later.

I kept meticulous journals from the age of 8 or 9, right up until Bennett was born (which M has been told to burn quickly should anything happen to me). I can't believe I stopped keeping track once all the interesting stuff actually began to happen.