Monthly Archives: August 2009

Spoons


I set the table for breakfast yesterday morning and I got the spoons wrong again. I laid out a small spoon for Dee and a big soup spoon for Rob.

“Honey,” Rob called from the dining room as I headed back to get the oatmeal. “Can you bring me a small spoon.”

“Oh, it’s the small spoon for oatmeal, isn’t it?” I said as I headed back with oatmeal and proper spoon.

“Yep, it’s small spoon for ice cream and oatmeal and big spoons for cereal and soup,” Rob said as I dished up breakfast to Dee.

“You’d think I would know that after all this time,” I said.

And yet, it hasn’t been all that long. Two years and small change of married life and just a smidge more as a couple. It just feels like we’ve been together since the dawn of existence, and it’s moments like this which remind me that I am a johnny-come-lately to Rob’s life.

The spoons thing isn’t a big deal. Dee has an obsession with a particular spoon that she would eat with exclusively if I felt like catering to her. I don’t. The big spoon/little spoon thing is something that Rob learned as a child and it stuck tenaciously. We all carry our families’ odd quirks or specific ways of doing things with us as we make our way in the world. If we are lucky, we don’t completely warp our own children with them.

Dee watches Rob like paparazzi stalking the Jolie-Pitts. Very little escapes her notice and she imitates him and adopts his preferences.

Over the weekend she was at a sleep-over and took a nasty tumble on the new sidewalks in front of her friend’s home. She barked the hell out of her knee, ankle and the back of her thigh. Nearly as I can tell, she almost went end over end. Friend’s mother cleaned and dressed the wound with the appropriate Hanna Montana band-aids but as Dee is the kind of child to let bandages wear off, neither Rob nor I checked the extent of the wounds. She said she was fine and we took her at her word.

Tuesday evening, Rob peeled them off her after her bath and discovered weeping, pus-pocked wounds. That and a nasty case of pool-induced conjunctivitis kept Dee away from swim lessons on Wednesday and might scuttle this round of lessons. Rob expertly cleaned, disinfected and dressed Dee’s knee. When I went to clean it off the next afternoon and reapply polysporin this is what I heard,

“That’s not how Rob does it, Mom. Just listen to me and I will tell you what he does.”

Right. What he does is right and you do … not right.

Right now she loves that little spoon, but I can see the soup spoons on the horizon.

Hump Day, Right?


Lost track of the days. Partly because it was the Long Weekend but Rob is on holiday and I measure time by his schedule or Dee’s schedule in the summer because the familiar road markers of my schedule are on hiatus.

There is really nothing to blog about today. Some might argue that I rarely write about anything of import, so why would today be any different? But it’s very true of today. It’s just Wednesday. I will take Dee to swim lessons and then skipping camp and be home in time to make lunch and help Rob pour cement for the sidewalks around the side of the house and retaining wall out back by the drive.

On the writing front, I tossed around Eubie ideas because I promised a bit of flash for Friday and because I think Eubie has a novel in him. A short one. Angst driven urban fantasy with a dollop of social commentary. It’s a shame I don’t have the time to knock that one  off because one of my favorite agent blogs is open to submissions again – but I have memoir and Sundogged. The latter took a wild turn and I have to redirect it. I still think I will have it done before school starts. At this point I am aiming for done and will work on polish in the fall. 

Rob read the four chapters of memoir I pounded out last week.

“It’s compelling,” was his quick and dirty assessment. I think that’s good. He did go on to clarify later that he thought I’d done a decent job of the writing. He wouldn’t tell me that if he didn’t think so regardless of how awesome a wife I am because he is a Virgo and a precisionist when it comes to the written word.

I’m going to polish it over the next couple of weeks and then perhaps let someone other than Rob read it. I am leery to lend it out, but I need to know if it is “compelling” to someone who doesn’t sleep with me, and I could use the extra beta readers. I think most writers have a number one reader, but I’m betting also they have second and third opinions as well.

Conversations about Life After Death … and Sex


We went without the new air-conditioner the other night as the weather has swung hard toward fall. With the a/c and the fans off, we can hear the house creaking and groaning again. The upstairs is far less prone to otherworldly knocking and since Rob and the girls took Shelley’s ashes for scattering in Kananaskis last month, the house has had a psychically empty feel to it.

“How do you want me to haunt you?” Rob asked as he crawled into bed and I nestled into the crook of his arm, my head resting on his shoulder.

“Nothing scary,” I said. “You know I wouldn’t appreciate being scared.”

“No knocking and rattling?”

“You’ll have to think of something else,” I told him. “Something I would appreciate.”

“How about cuddling then?” he said.

“Oh, I would like that. Ghostly cuddles would not be scary.”*

“Cuddles it is then,” he agreed.

“But I am wondering,” I said, “if you are dead and on the other side, what would Shelley have to say about you coming back here to cuddle me?”

“Buzz-kill,” he muttered.

Only we could have a rational conversation like this.

* I realize that it’s a matter of opinion.