Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Life in the TestosterZone #1

Yes, I live with four boys... one I'm married to, and three I deliberately brought into this world (which sometimes causes me to question my sanity).

As I've mentioned, I have NEVER been a "girly girl". Still, boys may live on the same planet, but it's a totally different world. So I thought I'd share a few little moments of "boy-ness" in my life, from time to time.

* The picture is not a recent one, but is a good illustration of how differently boys' minds work. Two of the three boys thought it was a GREAT idea to put a huge albino PYTHON around their necks. (Apparently only the youngest had any doubts about the wisdom of that plan!) This kind of snake, as you probably know, kills its prey by constricting... squeezing! I don't see any large lumps in the snake that would indicate it had recently swallowed, say, a chicken, or a neighbor's yippy dog, or anything else, so for all I know the snake is thinking, "Oooo! Three for the price of one!" This poses no problem for boys.

* After church Sunday I noticed a purple mark on Gunnar's neck. (Nothing alarming, it was from a marker.) I asked him how that happened, and got the classic - and truthful - response, "I dunno." When he took his shirt off later, I realized the purple line extended down the right side of his neck and made a little squiggle out on his shoulder. And he had no idea how it got there! Okay, honestly, I think I would remember if I or someone else (!) managed to get a felt pen under my shirt and do some doodling! Gunnar wandered into the bathroom to have a look in the mirror and seemed shocked. He said to me, in genuine innocence, "How did that get there? Can you get that off? That's embarrasin'!"

* Kerry took the boys out for a walk around the neighborhood while I was making dinner the other night. They came home without him. When I asked them, "Where's Daddy?" they told me, completely dead-pan, "He got mugged. But he told us to run on ahead." Right.

* Then, as dinner wasn't quite ready, I asked them to amuse themselves calmly. That's what I said. What they heard, I have no idea. They headed into the living room saying, "Hey - I know! Let's wrestle!" Great idea.

* This is my current personal favorite. Gunnar needed a bath one evening, so I sent him upstairs to get clean jammies and underwear. This seemed to take a long time, and he came down with just jammies. I asked him, "Gunnar, where's your underwear?" And, as if this were a perfectly ordinary thing to happen, he said, "I dropped my underwear out the window." What, on purpose?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Your title here made me laugh. Once, we had to give a member of our church a ride after one of our church meetings, I climbed in the back with the kids and he turned around and after one look at all the bodies in our big monster van and said, WOW, there's a lot of estrogen floating around in here. Wonder where that came from?