still not a real man

Sarah was nudging Mia to eat her chicken tonight, explaining that eating chicken (as opposed to, say, something from last night’s sugar haul) would give her muscles. So Mia ate some chicken, and flexed her muscles, elbows at right angles, fists balled up, teeth clenched into an tense grin. We could see the muscles forming right there at the table.

Then Max ate some chicken, and he flexed his muscles, his face screwed up and angry.

Then I got into the act, flexing my own muscles, and the three of us exchanged grimaces, straining to keep our muscles tight.

After a beat, Mia looked at me and said “Now really do them.”

A moment later, Mia told us all about someone’s dad at school who had muscles that went two inches out from his arm. Then she looked over at me and cleared up any potential confusion. “Not you, Daddy.”

   

 

squirrels

Mia brought home a bean sprout that became a bean plant, and that inspired us. So we planted forget-me-nots, and marigolds, and poppies. And chives and cilantro, and something else that I forgot to label, and since it never took, just like the flowers never took, I’ll never know what it was.

We’re learning.

And then we planted cucumbers in a big bowl, and they thrived, and then our gardener told me to take them out of the bowl and put them in the ground, which I did, over near the front of the house, behind the wall, near the apricot tree, and they struggled in the 100-degree heat, but made it through, until sometime between yesterday morning and this morning, when a squirrel, or maybe a team of squirrels – probably tweaker squirrels – came and ate them. All but one. Which will probably be gone by morning.

Damn tweaker squirrels.

Also: We went on a hike, and we brought along Max’s cowlick.

  

 

not a real man

About a year ago, Mia and Sarah were looking at a broken shelf in the pantry, and Mia suggested that we needed a man to come fix it. That’s who fixes things, after all – when the television broke, a man came to fix it, and when the dishwasher broke too. But the shelf I can fix, and Sarah said as much, but Mia wasn’t sure.

“No, Mommy, we need a man to fix it,” she insisted.

“Well, Daddy’s a man,” said my wife, offering a vote of confidence.

“No, Mommy,” Mia said, clearly irritated. “A real man.”

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised this morning when Max, Mia’s personal acolyte, was telling me about what names are animal names and what names are people names, and I pointed out to him that Max was “a man’s name.”

“No it’s not,” Max said to me. “I’m not a man! I don’t ride a truck.”

Men ride in trucks?

“Yeah. Men ride in trucks or ride in tractors.”

Which…I don’t.