Keep your head in the game
Typical Monday – too much to do on the to do list to ever think you’ll accomplish any of it. Then a deep breath and picked up Jake this afternoon from school and I was trying to tell him about all the stuff we had to do – get Halloween candy, scrape the barnacles off the canoe, get gas, carve jack-o-lanterns. He said “Halloween candy?” and then became monomaniacal about the idea. Finally, I was like this is candy for me to hand out at Halloween – you have your own candy at home and you’re not eating any of this candy. “Halloween candy?” he said and repeated like a mantra till we were finally in the drugstore and you’d have thought I told him we were getting crack.
When we finally were making our way home – I reminded him that we had to scrape the barnacles, now set up the cheap train set, and carve jack o lanterns so we didn’t have time for Scooby Doo or other movies today. I said, you got that Jake? – He said, “Yeah, keep your head in the game, Ocho.”
Good grief – I had to swallow my tongue to keep from belly laughing. We played in the haystack that my neighbor built, we scraped the barnacles, we set up the cheap train with the tracks that didn’t meet, and then when we started to carve the jack o lanterns – by now Jake was bored. Thankfully, Mignon, the cute little 5 year old next door came over and piqued his interested in pumpkins again. And then S came by to help carve the faces – Jake liked the scary one S made with the stitches over his eye.
Later, I took him home and walked into parents with two babies in their arms and I took Ava and in minutes she was sleeping so they begged me to put her to bed. I felt like Mary Poppins. As I drove down Napoleon on my way home at 8:30, I got a text from M, the extra train tracks were in the bottom of the carton – I just had to turn it over to find them. Sigh.