TheMommyBlog

Monday, September 29, 2008 Family

From the back yard, I heard my ten-year-old say to my six-year-old, “And that is how you do the hammer throw in the Olympics.”

I paused before asking, “Do I want to see this hammer throw?”

Logan replied, “It’s not really a hammer throw; it’s The Death Throw.”

“Okay, I’m going to go back to reading, mmmkay?”

See? No heart attack.

And then, “Mom! I threw the tennis ball into the other yard!” All three children were thirteen feet up in the air, sitting on top of the fort.

“Too bad, hon, you’ve lost it.”

“Wait! There’s our neighbor! Hey, we threw a tether ball over there!”

“You threw a tether ball over the fence? The one with no air in it?” The neighbor has a pool, and a dog. A young dog. A coon dog.

I climbed up with them and called to my neighbor, “Don’t go to too much trouble getting that back from the dog. They threw it over there, let Jake have his turn with it.”

I went back inside, and three minutes later, my daughter ran in shouting, “Mama! They’re smashing the blue plastic bin to pieces—”

“Stop! I don’t need to hear it. It will make my frown lines deepen. Just pick everything up and come to dinner. And NO, I don’t want to hear who did it, I just want… come inside, okay?” I put out fish sticks for them and a glass of wine for me.

And now, it’s forty minutes to bedtime.