Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

I had this great idea Wednesday. Jonathan would love it! We would finger paint! Indeed he loved putting the paint on the plate. But then…he seemed bothered that there was paint on his fingers. This is the whole point of finger paint. He didn’t get the point and wanted it cleaned off — IMMEDIATELY! So I cleaned it off . . .

And he abandoned finger painting for the pool….

Where, after being told he could not put my shoe in the pool, he put his in instead when I wasn’t looking.

Hubby says, as he looked at this photo: “So, instead of stopping him you took photos?”

In my defense, the shoe was already soaked. What good would it have been to stop him at that point?

He also decided rocks would be great to put in the pool, so he did.

He got muddy retrieving his rocks and this seemed to bother him very much (wow he is so much his father’s son) so we finally retreated inside and gave him a bath, which he yelled at me through (not sure why.)

But he could have been forced to swim with me once again at a really big pool where mommy had the nerve to hold him up instead of letting him sink like a rock to the bottom of the pool. More on that later, of course.

For other Photo Story Fridays, go here and then here.

Like Cecily’s recent confession of letting her children stay up late, I too have a problem being tough on my little one when it comes to bed time, which is why earlier this week he was exposed to the modern day King Kong movie and became unglued at our decision to not let him see the end of the movie – or in fact more than five minutes of it.

What really seemed to cause the break down was absolute sympathy by our toddler for Kong’s plight.

Stop laughing!

I’m serious.

Jonathan seems to really empathize with characters in TV shows and in movies.

He becomes very agitated and looks at me with concerned expressions while pointing at the screen when the Wonder Pets are trying to save an animal from impending doom.

And the other day when Daisy broke Henry’s vase on Oswald? Whoa. Utter meltdown of concern for how Daisy was going to tell her friend about the accident. Lots of pointing and “oh!” and “Gone! Gone!” which seems to be his word for “crisis!”

With all this said, I should have known better than to let him watch even a moment of King Kong. But Hubby had stopped on the channel and well, there it was – Kong throwing cars around and obviously in a complete panic that he could not find his beautiful girl.

Jonathan was transfixed. His bright blue eyes were huge saucers and his mouth hung open.

This was about the point in the movie where Kong was going to climb the Empire State Building and meet his untimely demise at the hands of the Army.

I decided Jonathan was a little too young to see this and suggested Hubby turn the channel.

Breakdown City.

“Uh! Uh! Gone! Gooone!” cried Jonathan, pointing at the screen, now showing “Army Wives.”

“Goooone!”

He ran to the TV and turned it off and on as if the big monkey would reappear again. But, the monkey was indeed “GOOONE!”

Hubby decided to explain that the “monkey” was gone because some nice people had captured him to take him back to an island with other big monkeys.

I added that now the monkey could marry and “make little monkeys.”

It was late — otherwise I might not have said this.

Needless to say, getting the little one to bed was a bit of a trial after that. I calmed him down with a reading of Curious George, of all things, and he finally fell into a fitful sleep – probably dreaming of that poor big monkey and wondering how he could get him out of his predicament. And no, it was not the Curious George book previously referenced.

For stories of other big monkeys, go to Humor Blogs.

I know. It’s not nice to judge smokers and it’s a problem I need to work on.

**So I try not to say anything to those who do smoke, blackening their lungs and opening the doors to their bodies for cancer to just waltz right in. (And yes, I know those who have never smoked and still have cancer, so don’t lecture me.)

But at the same time I do not agree with promoting the habit like there is nothing wrong with it.

And I definitely do not condone children’s books slipping it in like there is nothing wrong with a guy sitting in the zoo, picnicking, and puffing on a cigarette.

“Um…huh?” you may be saying to yourself right now.

So here is the back story on this:

Yesterday Hubby and I went out for dinner and afterwards we wandered around a book store, like we used to do when we were dating, and then had some coffee. Unlike when we were dating, me looking at journals I can’t afford, him looking at Star Trek books, this time I scoured (scowered? Crap. I stink at speling spellling spelling.) the children’s section for books to read to Jonathan.

I had already purchased one Curious George book a couple weeks ago and unlike other times when I tried to encourage Jonathan to let me read to him, Jonathan actually paid attention and pointed out characters and objects. Therefore I thought another Curious George book would be a good option.

Jonathan fell asleep before I could read the book to him, thankfully, because while flipping through the pages I noticed this:

“What is so wrong about a family picnicking in the park?” you may ask.

Nothing. Nothing is wrong with a family picnicking in the park.

Nothing unless the father is obviously SMOKING!

Hello? Smoking? In a children’s book?!

“Well, it says this book was adapted from one of the old movies, so it was probably from the 60s or something when they didn’t realize how dangerous nicotine was to a person,” I thought.

I flipped open the front of the book to check. It wasn’t adapted from a 60s film. The copyright said, 1985. What they didn’t know about the dangers of smoking in 1985? Apparently not.

Now, this wasn’t the only thing about the book which offended me. The other offensive part was George rescuing a balloon for a little boy from some monkeys. Some monkeys in a cage. Monkeys like George, imprisoned in a cage. These monkeys were blue and George is brown, but still – how offensive and rude is that? So rude that the Offended Blogger might even like it. But I sure didn’t. How can I tell my son that it is OK for George to be out and running around because he is brown, but apparently it isn’t OK for the blue monkeys to run around the city with a man in a yellow hat?

Wow. Talk about a negative message of inequality.

Needless to say, I have pushed this book to the side to ponder whether or not I should read it to my highly impressionable 20-month old and make it seem like 1) smoking in the zoo, or anywhere is OK or 2) that imprisoning other creatures simply because they have a different color fur is right.

What do you think I should do? If you don’t tell me, I’m going to have to ask the people over at Humor Blogs.com and I’m afraid to even think about what they would tell me to do.

** This is all a joke — the stuff about not liking smokers, etc. You guys know that right? Because some of my best friends are smokers. I mean, come on, don’t take it too seriously. This is a Humor Blogs post and a mommy blog post. I mean, I am worried about the book, that part is serious. OK. Enough disclaimers.

Our wedding guests probably thought one of two things six years ago today.

Either: “Wow. She’s really gotten fat. She must be preggars.”

Or: “Wow. The girl looks like she snorted something before she walked down the aisle.”

Neither were true. I mean, I had gotten really fat, but I was not pregnant. And I did look like I had snorted some kind of illegal substance before staggering down the aisle, but I hadn’t.

No, in fact, the fatness was due to stress and eating like crap for a good number of months before the wedding.

The stoned expression on my face turned out not to be the sheer terror some might have thought I had at getting married. Instead, I had three infections, was most likely retaining fluid because of those infections, and was pretty unsure of where I was much of that day and the days to follow.

I didn’t know I had three infections the day of my wedding. Everyone in my family told me the fact I was shivering and weaving like a meth-addict was because I was nervous. I took their word for it, but the night before the wedding, curled up in a bed in my old bedroom, I began to think they were all wrong and I was indeed sick.

Standing at the end of the aisle the next morning somewhere around 11 a.m., bleary-eyed and not totally sure if I was dreaming or awake, I whispered to my dad: “I can’t do this.”

No, I didn’t mean I couldn’t marry Hubby, though that freaked me out a little. What I meant was I was pretty sure I could not walk down that aisle without falling flat on my face, a feverish blob of white satin and Mary Kay make up.

“Oh yes you can,” my dad said and practically dragged me to the end of the aisle where Hubby awaited, sexy as all get out.

I had actually saw him through the church doors before the wedding. I was in the back of the church with a gaggle of girls around me dressing me and Sis K paintin’ me all up with make up when the door opened a crack and I saw him standing in the sanctuary, pacing and looking slightly nervous. Oooh-la-la did he look good.

I couldn’t believe he was actually marrying me in only a few more minutes and if the fever had invaded my brain any further than it already had I might have ripped open those doors and planted a huge kiss on his sexy lips, much to the shock of the guests waiting for the wedding to start.

But, alas, the fever was affecting me, but not yet to the point of delirious public-molesting.

Obviously I made it through the wedding. I even staggered through the reception. Our honeymoon involved me laying in bed, telling Hubby I was sure I was at death’s door step and later finding out that germs had indeed invaded my brain the week before and the day of our wedding.

I joke now that I never would have married Hubby if it hadn’t been for the infections scrambling my brain, but it isn’t true. I would have married Hubby with or without the germs sucking the life out of me.

And now, six years later, here I sit, not with germs sucking the life out of me, but exhaustion from our rambunctious, sleep-hating 20-month old (you so know a post is coming out of that reference).

Exhaustion has thrown a fog over my mind and I wonder if this post will make any sense at all, yet I continue to write, knowing I can’t let the day go by without recognizing that my life really started 10-years ago when I met Hubby and only got better six years ago when we both said “I do,” to a life of uncertainties, challenges, trials, and unspeakable joys.

I love you, W.H.

Germs or no germs, July 13, 2002 was the happiest day of my life.

Hosted by Cecily and MamaGeek

Don’t get me wrong. I like our local playground. It’s behind the local elementary school. It has a great jungle gym with slides galore. It even has a smaller jungle gym for the little guys (and gals). It has two swing sets and a teeter-totter thing.

Jonathan loves it. Mommy loves it.

What mommy doesn’t love are some of the children who can be found at this playground. Children whose parents don’t watch them, or tell them to stop climbing “up the slide” when someone is trying to slide down it (the way it is supposed to be used). Children whose parents sit and talk on the cell phone and laugh and laugh and laugh, even when their children are crowding and pushing around a toddler obviously much younger and smaller than them, instead of saying to their children, “Hey, watch the little one.”

Children whose parents sit and talk and laugh on that cell phone even when their three-year old screams “No!” and shoves the much younger, smaller child so hard that the much younger, smaller child falls backwards down a flight of stairs and off a two-foot high platform, bending and twisting at weird angles and then lands flat on his face in the wood chips with a hard thud. Children whose parents don’t even stand up to see what happened when much younger, smaller child begins to cry.

Needless to say, this mommy grabbed her much younger, smaller child and acted like a very mature adult, whipping around and screaming at the child who did the shoving: “You don’t shove!” and then stomping off to her car, screaming toddler in tow, mumbling (rather loudly) about “dumb mothers who sit talking on the phone and don’t watch their children!”

And the other mother?

She’s probably still on that phone chattering away about her dye job while her kids hang upside down off the slide like the monkeys they are.

(Also, these photos were not taken on the day in question here. They were taken on a much happier day.)