Boys Will Be Boys

I will begin with sweetness and light:


This is a very sweaty Sean at a local jump house establishment. They had fun. Dad stayed with them, while I drove off to shop for a new bathroom scale.


Sorry for the shirtless aspect, but this is what we have been seeing around the house ad nauseum these days. Trevor spends a good part of every day, standing on his head against any furniture or walls he can find.


The boys, in their endless teasing of the dog, finally suffered a less than pleasant response. I fully believe that Trevor is the more offending party in these antics, however, the dog managed to chomp down on Sean's forehead.

Then, he got the short end of the stick again when we went to get haircuts yesterday morning. Normally, they both love a trip for a haircut, but this turned out to be quite an ordeal.

There was a new heavy-set black woman working at the Great Clips where we always go. Somehow the lot fell to Sean again as she called out his name. To begin with, Sean looked downright scared of her. He didn't really say a word, but several times I thought he was going to burst into tears. The woman was sweating profusely and had to stop to wipe her brow with a towel about 20 times in between cutting. The whole time, I just wasn't sure she really knew what she was doing (or for that matter, had even really cut hair before).

After Sean descended from the chair, I noticed that the area around his ears looked like a square had been cut around the ears. I hemmed and hawed (I hate to be the customer who registers their dissatisfaction aloud). Finally, I asked if she wouldn't mind touching up the area over the ears just a bit more. Even after we left, I was still uncomfortable with the cut, but decided it was just hair. So, here they are after their trims (Trevor's turned out just the way he likes it - spikey).



At the moment, they are in their rooms
for the rest of their lives for a half hour following a horrible shopping adventure.

When we left the house at 2:10, I swear my blood pressure was in the normal range. We needed to take Harley over to the vet for a Bordatella shot (since the last time we went to Indiana Beach and kenneled him, he returned home with a case of kennel cough). That alone shot the old blood pressure right up.

The dog goes into manic mode and the little boys seem to feel that they have to mimic his behavior (checking out every single animal they see and wandering hither and yon). Thankfully, we were only there for about ten minutes.

Why I decided to follow up that brief adventure with another one, I don't know. Once the dog was safely crated at home, we headed off to Kroger. Sean noticed those EVIL race car carts (fine, back in the day, when I only had one child to deal with - EVIL when you have two boys along). Trevor assured me that he didn't even want to go in one, so I reluctantly agreed.

No, instead Trevor walked directly in front of the car cart the entire time and I ran over his ankles a few hundred times. Sean could not decide whether he wanted to be in the cart or out of the cart, so finally, I turned around and headed back to the cart corral and exchanged the EVIL cart for a normal one.

Sadly, this didn't solve the problems, since Sean persisted in trying to hang off the side of the cart ... the empty cart, I should add. I continued to run over ankles and beg them to walk nicely next to the cart. Trevor persisted in offering to help: "I want to pick out the bananas. Let me put the eggs in the cart. No, let me do it, Mom."

I thought it would be quickest to avoid the long lines and approached the self check-out lane. Once again, Trevor wanted to "help." I had to monitor closely so that we would neither leave with groceries we hadn't paid for nor pay for groceries we didn't leave with.

In the midst of the joint check-out effort going down, Sean piped up that he ... of course ... had to go to the bathroom RIGHT NOW. Helpful Trevor offered to take him to the bathroom. I reminded them to go to the women's and said I would be right there (the bathrooms were only about 10 feet from where I was completing our transaction).

When I popped my head in the door a minute later, they were both in the handicapped stall with the door wide open (I doubt the one other woman in the bathroom really minded). Sean jubilantly tattled on his brother: "Trevor peed ALL. OVER. THE. WALL."

I looked over, and sure enough, there was a puddle of urine at the base of the wall next to the toilet. I know that I really should have stopped, grabbed my purse from the cart, left the cart untended and joined them in the stall to clean up their mess.

Instead, smoke began to pour out of my ears, I ordered both of them to skip washing hands and come immediately with me to the van. I stormed out of the store with them both clinging to the sides of the cart. I drove the entire way home in silence while Trevor wondered aloud what his punishment might be.

I am quietly hoping that the individual who is assigned to clean those bathrooms today will be a patient young MAN who will merely be doing "his time" for all those occasions when he urinated all over the place as a young boy!

I am writing this all out now so that I can return to my blog twenty years from now and bring back these terribly present feelings of utter mortification. Because obviously, I'm going to look back on all this and miss these days, right? That is, if I live to see twenty years from now!