Today's Bot Quote

So, I had Bot doing his math in the dining room while Alex was with me in the kitchen because Alex likes to read his word problems out loud and that is excuse enough for Bot to claim he's "too distracted."  After washing some pots and getting Alex almost all the way through the lesson, I decided to go to the dining room to see how much Bot had accomplished in twenty minutes.  The answer was--not much.

 

"Is this all you've gotten done?"

 

Bot turned to stare up at me and said in a very plaintive, tiny voice,"Are you mad at me?"

 

"Are you manipulating me with those big puppy-eyes?"

 

He held his puppy-dog stare, then gave a long blink that used his long lashes and big eyes to the best advantage and, with the barest hint of a suppressed smile, said in a sweet little voice,"Trying to....Is it working?"

 

My Little Ad Man

Last night, Jake and Liam lugged into the playroom several large boxes and plastic bins full of the fall/winter clothes (which I think only made it up to the third floor in July or so) and I went through them and sorted out clothing for the various kids. Though I fold laundry in the Red Room (on the second floor), the seasonal sorting is a bigger task better done where there is room for all the bins and piles, hence the lugging allllllll the way downstairs to take advantage of the bigger TV and the bigger room (though Sunday is, for the record, a pretty piss-poor TV night once we hit 10pm. I was surprised, however, to discover that though Jake was so engrossed in his computer that he ignored everything i said, he caught every witty line in cable re-runs of Desperate Housewives....Jake likes Desperate Housewives, Jake likes Desperate Housewives!)

In just two hours I had a large bag of discards and the bins refilled with the sorted, folded clothes ready to be lugged upstairs and put into drawers in the morning--when the real challenge becomes figuring out who will be what size in the spring so that the spring/summer clothes get put away in some semblance of order, and how I store two boys' worth of stuff (Liam and Garrett) for the two or three years it takes the next boy (Bot) to grow into them (having Cory between is quite inconvenient) and how to fit two boys' worth of fall clothes into Bot's dresser. There was a whole laundry basket of new baby girl clothes of the next size ready to be washed, gloves and hats in a pile (which is pointless--when it comes time to find gloves and hats they'll all be missing anyway), and bins piled high with clothes. It being past 12:30am, I managed to drag Jake away mid-episode (I had seen the episode before and assured him that we would not find out in this episode what Orson's mother was holding over his head anyway) to go to bed, leaving the clothes in the playroom till morning.

So I was very happy I dealt with the whole thing even though it was after 10pm when I got started last night, because Alex came downstairs on a morning when the heat actually had to kick in dressed in a worn-out short-sleeved t-shirt and thin shorts, declaring he had nothing else in his drawer to wear. I smiled, took him by the hand, and led him into the playroom, telling him I knew where I could find warmer clothes for him.

We walked in the room and he immediately declared, "Boy, you could really use some Space Bags!"


"Really?"

"Yeah. It would sure save a LOTTA space!"

Clearly the ad time the Space Bags people buy on children's channels would be well worth it if seven-yr-olds had credit cards....