The Little Jobber

This is what I did:

• Put the cushions back on the sofa.
• Picked the crayons up off the floor and placed them on the coffee table.
• Carried the cat’s toy basket from the sofa to the corner where it belongs.

This is what happened:

As I was saying, my trip to Kansas City was great. I had a terrific time: Fun travel partner/roommate and worthwhile and motivating workshops. The best part was the speaker during the closing banquet. I’ll have to get to her in another post.

For now, I’ll write that I was very moved by the workshop on handling conflict. There is a lot of conflict in everyday life and how you handle it has a huge impact on your quality of life. I’d like to think that I’ve gotten better at handling conflict since Conal was born. Well, sometimes. It’s tough to handle conflict. So, I want to share this poem with you — you may be familiar with it already, but I wasn’t when it was read at the workshop:

The Cookie Thief, Valerie Cox

A woman was waiting at an airport one night
With several long hours before her flight
She hunted for a book in the airport shop
Bought a bag of cookies and found a place to drop
She was engrossed in her book but happened to see
That the man beside her as bold as could be
Grabbed a cookie or two from the bag between
Which she tried to ignore to avoid a scene
She munched cookies and watched the clock
As this gutsy cookie thief diminished her stock
She was getting more irritated as the minutes ticked by
Thinking “If I wasn’t so nice I’d blacken his eye”
With each cookie she took he took one too
And when only one was left she wondered what he’d do
With a smile on his face and a nervous laugh
He took the last cookie and broke it in half
He offered her half as he ate the other
She snatched it from him and thought “Oh brother
This guy has some nerve and he’s also rude
Why he didn’t even show any gratitude”
She had never known when she had been so galled
And sighed with relief when her flight was called
She gathered her belongings and headed for the gate
Refusing to look back at the thieving ingrate
She boarded the plane and sank in her seat
Then sought her book which was almost complete
As she reached in her baggage she gasped with surprise
There was her bag of cookies in front of her eyes
“If mine are here” she moaned with despair
“Then the others were his and he tried to share”
Too late to apologize she realized with grief
That she was the rude one, the ingrate, the thief

We make a ton of assumptions in life and we’re quick to think the worst. I’m not trying to be preachy, but I do think the sentiment is worth sharing: We shouldn’t be so quick to judge others or to be annoyed with them. I’m trying to practice a little more patience, in order to model it for Conal. Wish me luck!

Back from KC. It was a great trip. Great! But more on that later; I have little time for blogs today.

For now, let’s enjoy Conal eating an apple like a big boy. That’s right, no more peeling and slicing apples for this mom.

The last time I went away, Mo was still alive and Conal had just stopped nursing. Things were much different at Chez Jobber. For instance, back then I was a wreck getting ready to leave. Hmm . . . not the best example.

I’ve been a bit of a wreck this week, too, although not to the same degree. I’m busy fixing dinners for guys to have while I’m away, finishing up projects, packing and dealing with multiple layers of headaches and running around with my volunteer work. But, I don’t have the crazy hormones of someone who just that week finished weaning. Nor do I have that sick pit of worry-that-the-cat-will-die-while-I’m-away sitting in my stomach. So I’ve got that going for me.

I’m looking forward to this trip. Conal will be in good hands with my mom and Owen. Chili doesn’t seem to be sickly. I’m not flying home on a red eye, so I shouldn’t end up stranded.

Still, I’m going to miss Conal like crazy.

Yes, it is the same shirt. Conal’s is, of course, the Baby Gap version, while Owen’s is the adult one. Other than that? Same shirt. I saw that Owen was finally wearing the shirt so I was finally able to dress Conal in his match. Am I geeky? Diabolical? You be the judge.

We’re done with the Robeez. The Little Jobber was fit for his first pair of hard bottom shoes today.

Sure, he trotted around this summer in his Old Navy Birkenstock-style sandals, handed down from his big cousin, Brady. Now, though, he has real shoes. Real, brown, big-boy shoes. They don’t even have monkeys or aliens or anything on them. They are just brown. Plain ol’ brown shoes.

(Please note the vigor with which Conal is banging on his xylophone. This banging has replaced the screaming around here lately. For the most part. Except sometimes there is banging and screaming. And running. And that firetruck still plays almost non-stop. No lie.)

I’ve been going through photos. Printing some and, dare I say, uploading some to Facebook.

I know, I know. I caved. Let’s just leave it at that.

As I was saying, I’ve been going through photos from the past 16 months and I’m struck by how much Conal has changed. He’s no longer a little baby, he’s a little boy.

He’s getting old.

August 2007:

August 2008:

is a bee. For real.

Although it does kind of remind one of this.

For the record, the bee was dead. So it was really just a bee corpse. But, you know, still. It was a bee. In my toddler’s mouth. And I didn’t know it was dead. At first, anyway.

Owen decided that Conal had outgrown his Fisher-Price golf set and that it was time for a real club:

He seems to like it. Although he did get to the point where he just needed to drop his club and move on:

And so we took off to meet some friends at the Apple Festival, where Conal had fun traipsing through the pumpkins, real and not:

We ended up with a peck of apples and a half dozen apple cider donuts, which Conal absolutely loved. It was a great weekend!

If you have recently welcomed a boy into your family, or you are pregnant with a boy, or you have any interest in making a boy a part of your family sometime in the future, you might want to skip over my posts for the next few . . . years.

In fact, you may want to stop reading this blog. Just close your browser completely and never come back here. Forget the url. Lose my email address. Pretend you never met me. Dodge me when we happen to be shopping at Hannaford at the same time.

I will be sorry to see you go, but I will understand. I don’t want to scare you with my reports of the destruction and grossity grossness of boyhood. Well, toddler boyhood. Conal’s toddler boyhood, anyway. I don’t want you to think that boys are hard to handle and that they do crazy, scary things. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of life with a boy.

Not all boys relish in the hard-core boyness of boydom. So, don’t worry! You know how on those diet ads they’ll say something like, “Results not typical” when the spokesperson has lost like a hundred pounds? Well, that might be similar to what’s going on here. You know, maybe my tagline should be, “Destructive and gross actions not typical.”

Unless they are . . .

But they might not be! I mean, I’m sure that not all boys think it is hilarious when their moms suction the mucus out of their noses and, at the end, they do a super-quick head turn so the string of mucus slaps across their faces, nose to ear. Sure, some boys think that is funny. Some boys think that when the nose suctioner thingy comes out, it is time for fun! But, not all boys do. Of course, I don’t know these boys. I only know the boy who thinks mucus suctioning is a great big joke fest.

Similarly, not all boys like to get dirty. They don’t all like to lick their dirty hands and then rub those spitty, dirty hands on their faces. No! They don’t all like to do that! It’s not fun for all boys!

But, again, I don’t know those boys. I only know the boy who thinks that licking his dirty hands and then rubbing them over his face is second in the Whoopee-doo Fun Times list only to mucus suctioning. Or, as we have recently learned, hiding the remote in very bad, bad places. Or, possibly, smooshing cottage cheese or ketchup in his hair. Or shoving his mouth full of food, only to turn around and pull the food out. Or throwing his mom’s cell phone away. Yeah, those are all right up there on the list, too.

Anyway, the bottom line is, I don’t want to scare you. But, these are the things that happen around here and you can be pretty sure I’ll have more of the grossity grossness and destruction to report. If you need to move on, I’ll understand. Just, you know, if you do dodge me at the grocery store? Don’t give me the evil eye. I’ve got my hands full over here.