Long-winded Real Time to Remember (with winter lighting)
The boys have needed haircuts for weeks now. They were past the point of woodchucks and were well on their way to this. I've been running on fumes, though, and lacked both time and fortitude for the task.
They must have been saving good conversation because I laughed my way through (part of) the haircuts.
#1.
This afternoon, Luci had a misadventure with her tooth that resulted in a split tooth slicing through 1/4 inch of her gumline, leaving a root inside, so Aidan spent part of his haircut telling me about teeth. After he explained to me the process of tooth loss and regrowth (Lose one tooth; grow another! Lose that tooth, and no new tooth appears.), I affirmed his knowledge with real-life application. Our mutual friend had a bicycle accident and lost an adult tooth when he was about 12, and he's entertained us with the false one ever since.
"Yeah," I said, "It's just like ...[make your guess here]... He lost his adult tooth, and so the dentist made him a fake one to use."
"Ooohhh," Aidan said, "Me thought him made his tooth!"
"Nope," I replied, "A dentist made it."
Aidan thought this was silly and said scornfully, "Me not need dentist to make a tooth. All me need is cardboard and scissors [pantomimed cutting out a tooth shape from cardboard] and then paint to paint it!"
He could make a pretty good living selling teeth to all the people who are duped into overpaying dentists.
#2.
Me, scissors in hand, abruptly snapping, "AIDAN! Stop jumping around! I just cut a little chunk out of your hair, and your haircut is going to look funny if you keep wiggling!"
Aidan, responding with a typical lack of concern, "Me not care. Me hope my haircut is funny because then people will laugh at me."
He could do pretty well withstanding bullying, too, I bet, if he had to attend government schools.
#1.
Zeke was in rare form, too, but of a distinctly different variety. He read comic books until the last part of his haircut, which he spent wisely by catching literal fistfuls of his thick hair and stockpiling them on his lap.
Backstory:
Since summer ended, and he can't let ALL his energy loose outdoors, Zeke's been in a frenzy of planning all manner of things to build. He keeps asking me to look at drills on Amazon and then, when I tell him I'm not buying him one for Christmas, counting his money to see if he has enough (he does). Anyway, one of the things he's been dreaming about and sketching building plans for is a flat raft. His original plan didn't include anything buoyant, and after I showed him a youtube video of a man who built a flat raft with empty water bottles under it for buoyancy, he locked onto that idea. He also hates the idea of wasting anything potentially useful for building, e.g., watching men burn our old cupboard and porch steps troubled him. What a waste of wood!
Holding all this luscious hair in his lap, he thought and thought and then said, "I know! This would make a good hair pillow! Look, feel it!" before holding up a fistful to my face and rubbing it on my cheek. He was about to go stuff it in his pillow, but I forbade that, though I did concede and allow him to save it in a plastic bag. His plan was to save his hair for the next 12 months until he had enough to fill an entire pillowcase, but, apparently, he changed his mind, because he just came downstairs dripping from the bath with a handful of wet hair in his hand. "Mama!" he proclaimed in triumph, "Hair FLOATS! I can use it to put under my boat next summer!"
Sigh. And I sent him up to the tub to wash the hair off his body.
#2.
Remember Zeke's corn maze in the living room? I meant to put up a real-time-to-remember post that day but forgot. The entire reason he was building a deer trap with corn is because hunting fever overtakes all the country folk around us this time of year, and he must have caught some of the excitement. He was trying to figure out a way to secure us venison by legally catching a deer without a hunting or trapping permit, but I kept squashing all his ideas by saying they were illegal, so he decided to trap one with a tempting pile of field corn and then put the deer inside a fence.
"Could I shoot it then?" he asked.
"Nope," I replied. "It would still be illegal."
The fact that my tender-hearted tin man could never carry out such a plan notwithstanding, he thought for a time before saying, "I know! I will catch it with corn, put it in a fence, and then not feed it anything until it dies!"
I mentioned the cruelty of such a death, and he quieted. When I went on to say, "And, besides, Zeke, if you want to get us deer meat, and then you starve the deer to death, it won't have any meat left to eat!"
He then couldn't couldn't stop chuckling at himself.
