A Peek Into My Evening

Just a few things of note from last night. I have a mind dump of sorts. Consider yourselves warned.

Deal wrote a thank you note to Barack Obama. He got the book Of Thee I Sing and thinks Obama himself sent it to him. I can’t break it to him that I got the book at Costco. Besides, who am I to squash hand writing thank you notes?

Bird started playing The Entertainer in his piano lessons. I was hanging with Deal in the waiting area and heard the Scott Joplin ragtime coming ever so tentatively from the studio. My Bird playing The Entertainer! A proud mommy moment indeed.

Bird and Deal’s appetites will surely send me back to work. I need a paycheck to pay Sallie Mae and Harris Teeter. We won’t be able to afford to continue to feed them healthy food once they are teenagers. At ages 8 and 6, this is what they had for dinner between them:

4 chicken sausages (Italian, heavy on the fennel)
spinach (1 huge bag split among three of us)
2 bowls of quinoa mixed with a paste of red peppers, garlic, tomatoes, and parmesan
2 glasses of milk

1 hour after dinner, this is what they ate:

grilled cheese sandwich
crackers and Boursin cheese
peanut butter and banana smoothie

They would have opened up the pantry and searched for more, but I made them get ready for bed. I was half expecting them to start eating the toothpaste.

And then began the bedtime dance of the boxer shorts, replete with Lark the Beagle/Corgi barking the beat.

Bird is fascinated infatuated with baseball these days. He is also keenly interested in the civil rights movement. It’s a perfect balance of yin and yang going on in his brain. Bird’s bedtime reading was a book about Jackie Robinson. I love reading biographies with him. It takes me back to when I was a kid and inhaled every biography my school librarian could find for me. Bird’s questions after reading books like tonight’s selection can be tough, but I love that he is inquisitive and sensitive to the world’s injustices. And after all, if he can’t discuss this heady stuff with his mother, whom can he talk to?

Deal, on the other hand, chose the most excruciating book I’ve ever read for his bedtime story. Captain Raptor and the Space Pirates. I’d rather read the ingredients list of Lunchables. I balked and groaned as I made my way through this painful book. It just left me wondering how a publisher would see virtue in such a book. It also gave me hope that perhaps a publisher will see light in my book proposal too. And by they way, even Bird hated this book. He got up and walked out of the room to go read on his own in bed. He left with a heavy sigh, shaking his head like a contrarian old man.

I wanted to read something else entirely, but neither Bird nor Deal would have any of it. I guess Surviving Fights With Your Brothers and Sisters, a Book About Sibling Rivalry does not make for happy dreaming.

Then again, dinosaurs and space pirates aren’t what sweet dreams are made of either.

Forget the Mrs., here’s to you, Jackie Robinson.

PS
On a totally unrelated note, what the hell happened to September?!