Thursday, December 18, 2008

I might always make a beeline to touch Frankie's potty, but, darn it, I'm smart, Mom

A week ago, my house was spotless. I had 18 women from BSF over for our Christmas lunch and the place was sparkling. Today, not so much. I vowed, VOWED, to keep the house looking like it did that day and succeeded for, oh, 48 hours or so. But then we baked seven dozen peanut butter blossoms, five batches of caramel corn and 6 dozen pecan tarts. My friend Cam and I made two hundred truffles while the kids literally took out every toy in the house. Frankie and I made vegetable soup together and she added fistfuls of carrots to the Cuisinart but couldn't push them down fast enough to prevent orange curliques from spraying about the kitchen and sticking to the cabinets. And the final straw is my sinus infection which feels like someone has a fist rammed under my cheekbone and is trying to push it out through my eye socket. It has completely sapped my mojo. So the house has its familiar, how shall we put it, PATINA back. A somewhat used look involving a lot of baby tights balled up in the corners and Cheerios crunching underfoot.
But while the house deteriorates, I continue to regret my earlier comments regarding my suspicions that Molly might have a sub-par intellect because of her perpetual cheerfulness. I'm not sure why I equate a happy disposition with mental feebleness. Perhaps because it seems as though the higher your IQ the more you understand of the world and the more you realize, DUDE, this is a seriously flawed place, I think I should be a bit crabbier. Molly has proven herself by her ability to say two words and perform two signs. She has been signing "fan" for a while now, but Dean just taught her "more" the other day in Meijers. She was hungry when we got to the store, so Dean bought a banana and fed it to her (this brings out the paranoia in me big-time, as I imagine everyone is thinking we are helping ourselves to the produce as we shop- I want to paste the receipt to her forehead). Between bites, she would let out the most piercing shrieks of irritation that the next morsel was not IN MY MOUTH RIGHT NOW, PEOPLE. Again, if I had been in charge, the fact that people are LOOKING AT ME would come into play and I would be shoveling that banana in as fast as I could to mute the racket, but Dean calmly took the opportunity to ever so sloooooooowly break off another piece and sign to her "More, Molly? You want more?" as she became apoplectic with fury at the delay, like, YES, WAS MY SHOUTING AND FRANTIC POINTING NOT CLEAR TO YOU?. Meanwhile, I busied myself three aisles away and still ended up next to a woman in the bulk food aisle who remarked, "Boy, somebody's not happy!" I tried to convey with my small smile that yeah, wow, some people have NO control over their children. But, to Dean's credit, by the end of the shopping trip, Molly had learned to sign "more." So now she screams, points, and then, THEN she signs "more." Now, if only she would stop eating cat food, she'd clearly be a genius.

1 comment:

Molly said...

clearly eating cat food and, say, drinking the cat's week-old water are not correlated to high intelligence in any way.