B, G and J Day: Behaving Badly

B:

Bryan has been checking Craig's List every evening and weekend morning for months, looking for bricks. If ever the phrase "Why buy new when used will do?" applies, it applies to bricks that will be used to make garden pathways.

Sunday morning--BING!--a "load" of bricks for $65. How much is a "load"? Four trips with our Explorer, that's how many. Two trips were that Sunday, and he made another both last night and tonight. The owner is moving, and these are bricks she hauled up from Pueblo when she came upon them as left-overs from some guy's new fence.

(If it's made out of bricks, do we still call it a fence?)

There were a few other pavers in the pile, too. Bryan took 'em.

Tonight he arrived home and pronounced the job finished. "Except for this one square paver. It was frozen to the ground. I couldn't pull it up. I couldn't kick it loose. I tried hammering a piece of wood against it with another brick--nothing!"

I kidded him, "And here I thought you were a man of perseverance."

A naughty grin slipped out. "Well," --uh-oh-- "I even tried warm water on it."

Hmm. As in. . .he knocked on this person's door and asked them for a cup of hot water?

He saw that I was puzzled and said, "It wasn't exactly warm water."

Pause.

Amy: "UGH! I'm putting that in the blog!"



G:

This morning at breakfast, Gemma told me how she spent a little time last night looking out her bedroom window, counting the airplane lights that flew by.

How pleasant. I told her that I used to do that when I was a little girl, too.

Then she said, "Yeah. And I use my binoculars to look into people's houses and see what they're watching on television."


J:

When we grocery shopped last week, each child started the circuit with a small bag of gummy worms for them to enjoy. You know that bribe. It works well for us, too.

It's Joshua's modus operandi to eat his treat one after another. Gemma likes to make hers last and last. This is why, when we got to the last aisle, she still had three gummy worms left and he'd been eyeing them since four aisles ago.

I turned back to the cart with a handful of yogurt to find Joshua kind of on top of her in the little bench seat they shared. And she was kind of. . .groaning, but it wasn't loud. It was muffled and annoyed.

"Josh, sit down," I told him.

He did. With a great big smile and a glistening, red gummy worm on his finger. Just when I realized what he'd done--that is, when I realized that he'd dug this worm out of his sister's mouth--he stuck it into his own.

I was laughing to hard to tell him that this was disgusting. As for Gemma, she sat there, a bit stunned, trying to calculate whether this kind of thing is allowed. On the one hand, she'd never heard an express prohibition against stealing food out of another person's mouth.

On the other hand, it was her gummy worm and she had been sucking on it!

On the other hand, her mother was now bent over from the laughter.

On the other hand, it had been in her mouth. . .