Stuff & Stuff

By the time I arrived to pick up the Chub-Chub – who is really more lanky than baby fat anymore – he was lounging on Carrie’s shoulder on the couch like a prince sharing a laptop – adventuring in aviation over Egyptian deserts – or something like that. Linnea was just walking out the front door for Six Flags after her midnight return. And while Puck had been fully entertained with an evening of drive-around auto bingo, escorted by Mom and Dad, wedged between his two aunts in the back seat – Rose had spent the night to escape the heat in her boiling ninety year-old apartment – and frozen custard… Puck’s father had been experiencing headache-neckache-nausea from Wednesday night… again. Mixes of heat, hummus, and aspirin apparently don’t combine so pleasantly for the big chap, and so he slept off the effects Thursday morning before applying to the work day later in the afternoon.

Puck spent more of his Quiet Hour wrapping kittens in sweatpants, removing the drawers from his dresser, and soaking Playmobil trinkets in the bathroom sink than anything else. I think. Sometimes I don’t really want to know what forms of chaos go on back there when I’m trying to take in as much peace as I can, to boost my system for the late afternoon. Of course today was less peaceful anyway, catching the game (while Mike Shannon lauded St. Louis as being located in the most giving and generous part of the world – which always makes me happy – hearing good things about my favorite city around an eighteen-hit win. I think I’m qualified to say that; I traveled a few pockets of the world, got a little flavor… STL is still the best. And I don’t believe that I over-glorify it. No, indeed). My quiet moments were still short-lived today… “Mama, I think she likes these pants! I don’t think I should wear them anymore, do you think? I can use these pants to put medicine in them, Mama, when we take Crackers to the vet and then if the vet can’t do anything, I can help with my vet stuff!” Sweet kid. And… “Mom! There is mud on the bathroom floor!” “That’s because you were walking in the basement.” [It’s dust, not mud; I protest.] “Aah! I do not know what is wrong with myself! I stepped on some mud and then I stepped on some water and made it come out!” “It’s ok, Puck. Just… get your pants back on.”

We got some suggestion of thunderstorms before four o’clock. You could almost smell it. And Puck associates thunderstorms with playing ball in the driveway. I promise I’m not a negligent mother. Sometimes when the wind picks up and the lightening hasn’t shown up yet, we play toss and catch outside. Within a certain level of sanity.

And, on the off-chance any cares to know – no, I don’t write all day long, nor most of the day, nor half the day, etc. on down. When you find yourself in that odd position of cranking out 1,000-word “essays” on a daily whim, it suddenly becomes akin to brushing your teeth. Hack it out in twice-a-day sessions.

Deed accomplished.

Puck got his biggest grins out of the day when I – not paying attention as usual – prepped my toothbrush instead of his for the nightly scrub. The giggling was profuse.

Unnecessary, Extensive Thought of the Day

Sometimes I really have to wonder about white toothbrushes. Who made that marketing decision? I know they like to pad them with some sort of colorful pop of rubber as an excuse for good grip. But come on. Really? A white toothbrush is just demoralizing. No matter how hard I brush, my teeth are never going to match that same shade of excellence. I’m never going to attain that shocking row of mini Mt. Everests on my own dime, or patience. Not even with that so-called whitening recipe – enough strawberries and baking soda to sink an ocean liner. It’s just not going to work.

Granted, I’m glad it’s not 1510. Those blokes must have suffered the most obtuse forms of tooth color. Some frightening creations of nature. Although… I guess the average peasant would probably have lived on a diet of grains, meat, poultry, eggs, potatoes, and vegetables. A cornucopia of all the stuff we’re supposed to eat today and mostly forget to do. So unless these vegetables included a heavy amount of chomper-staining components, like beets or maybe carrots, I guess maybe it wouldn’t have been exactly buttercup row.

So here’s the question. Take someone of elevated status — a king, emperor, something “up there” — maybe they get the hankering for things like fresh berries or fruit juice, coffee even, wine, or how about that crazy new fad of chocolate? [Can’t recall if they had imported that idea yet or not, by 1510. New world explorers, Aztecs, and all that stuff.] Anyway, this kind of junk is what really gets the old shade of white going to ruin. Just like today. The stuffs that leave toothy pirate grins before the evolution of paste and floss care. So maybe the royal lines and merchants and upper crust-men had worse shades than the lower classes? (Also makes me wonder if chocolate isn’t as bad for you as they say it is. After all, peasants died sooner than the wealthy, even though they probably had better immune systems. So what’s up with that?… I don’t really want to research all that nonsense, personally. Even if it’s not actually nonsense. Who knows. But more so because I really don’t have time to research the side-effects of sugar in the body of a five hundred year-old duke.)

So, yeah, I really never should have brought up the abhorrent idea of teeth and their color at all, I suppose. Rather avoided it altogether more like. After all, the discussion of teeth is best left to dentists, doctors, and persons who are most adept at adjusting oral beauty to please the eyes of passerby.

But… not to mention having to clean them. Ten times out of ten, Puck will plead to have OLeif brush his teeth instead of me. After all, I profoundly apply the family crest (o, pun) and motto passed down from my Dad – “Brush ’em till they bleed”. Puck lets out nothing less than a Tarzan yell when I get behind the brush of torture.

So got another piece of dribble out there….