Regular Life

Thursday ended with Shannon staring at her computer screen, tears streaming down her face. “Ben’s hiding in his closet,” she said. Ben likes to do that when I get home so I can “find” him.
Then Shannon looked up at me and sobbed, “He could have died.”
Just home from work, I set down my [...]

Benjamin, speaking of his doll: Baby Rex is a Super Diaper Baby.
Me: Well, then what are you?
Benjamin: (before I could blink) A Super Underwear Kid.
And that settles it.
———-
While re-hanging pictures on the kitchen wall following our first marathon painting night, I dropped one of them.
Startled, Shannon yelled, “Oh, mother –” and then stopped herself [...]

(Note: Yesterday’s post was my 700th published. About 60 days short of three years doing this, I figure that’s one post every 1.4 days.)
Before the thievery on Saturday, there was a windfall of epic proportions.
Sometimes, you just get lucky.
You’ll recall that we were at a place featuring games that spit out tickets rewarding [...]

Shannon was a victim of a theft and a theft attempt on Saturday. Both by the same person and in the same place.
After finally finishing up a customer call that made me all but miss a five-year-old’s birthday party, I showed up about an hour late to a six-year-old’s party hoping I could just [...]

(force a refresh to see May’s banner)

(click to enlarge)
Curses!
I sit at our home PC typing a blog post or some such nonsense. On one of her nights to put Benjamin to bed, Shannon walks into the guest bathroom to assess his teeth brushing progress. I hear them talking to each other, but can’t [...]

This post is about two more firsts in my life — one just fine and one kind of scary.
Sunday afternoon, Ben and I joined He B and his son for a football game. It wasn’t NFL. Heck, it wasn’t even AFL. Nope, this was IFL.
For those I lost after the first acronym, [...]

Boys do eventually grow out of some of their annoying tendencies. I’m sure girls do, too, but I’ve never brought one up — heck, never even had a niece — and so I claim no expertise in the female arena.
Yeah, so what’s new, right?
On Easter weekend, Benjamin and his cousin, LC, got along great [...]

(Readers of “Bernie” will be pleased — I hope — to find that the stuffed Part Ten really starts moving things along.)
Here’s the snow that piled up Monday night while all this was going on. Most we’ve seen (here) in the 2.5 years we’ve lived here. See Benjamin’s little Megablok wagon out there? [...]

Saturday, we told Benjamin it was his day to spend his $50 Christmas money from his grandparents (nod to commenter “Pops”). He had been pretending to play store at school and at home, so he had at least an inkling of how money worked.
He could go to any store he wanted, and after we [...]

You ever try plain, low-fat yogurt? I don’t mean vanilla. I mean plain. No sweeteners or flavors added.
It’s brutal.
It’s hard to eat healthy foods. Not just because of the taste or the cost, although those always are considerations. Part of the reason is that once I’ve decided to plunk down the extra cash for an [...]