Another episode of . . .
Random Bits of Actual Conversation at Our House
1) Kallan spins into the room and throws herself dramatically against me, reaching for my hand to keep herself from falling. As she grabs at my left hand, her palm scrapes along my wedding ring, and she halts the dance to stare at me accusingly, “Ow!” She brings her slight injury to her face for inspection and speaks in serious educational-filmstrip voice-over tones, “And so on that day, in Lake Oswego, the young white girl of astounding beauty learned a lesson she would never forget: Sometimes marriage hurts people.”
2) Mark and I got new iPhones, which have a feature on them called Facetime, which is a fancy name for video-chat. It just means that Mark and I can see one another when we talk on the phone. Describing this feature to our daughters, Mark explains, “It’s basically an intercom in my pants.”
Snort!
3) Maj is furious about something (the details of which escape me), and Kallan is trying to calm her down because I have said they cannot watch a show unless they can get along with one another. Maj leaps away from Kallan’s attempts to pet her hair, “Mother, tell this outrageous unboundaried child to stop soothing me before her life is cut tragically short by the Maj.”
4) Mark climbs into the car, but before doing so, he pulls off his leather jacket and passes it back to the girls, who protest loudly about its heaviness. Mark settles himself behind the wheel and then explains, “It is a heavy jacket. So not only do I look good, my legs are getting all burly from the workout.”
There is a silence as the girls consider this, and then Kallan leans forward, “Mom, with all the other fish in the sea, how exactly did you end up with him?”
I laugh, “He’s the one who took my bait, babe.”
Kallan sighs, “I wish I had been there at that moment, because I would have counseled you on his obvious throw-back status.”
Maj agrees, “Kallan’s right, Mother . . . you should have tossed him back with a burly splash.”
5) I am brushing my teeth in the bathroom, and Kallan is dancing and doing gymnastic stretches in the small space alongside me. As she twirls and leaps and then pulls her foot up over her head, the lights in the bathroom suddenly flicker and then surge with renewed brightness. I stare up at the lights, “Did it just get brighter in here?”
Without missing a beat in her routine, Kallan spins and answers casually, “No, Mom. That was just a release of some of my excess inner glow.”
6) After listening to Kallan and Maj whine about how they don’t want to go to the museum we have planned as the day’s outing, Mark decides to offer a bit of fatherly wisdom, “Listen, ladies. It won’t be too long before you are dating, and you can’t just whine like this when a boy suggests something he would like to do. You have to be polite and do what the boy wants to do even if you don’t like it.”
I walk into the kitchen, “Mark, you may want to replay those last two sentences in your mind and see if maybe that’s not quite what you meant to say.”
7) Because Mark is pretty sure he has hit on something with this whole, “You will be dating soon” thing . . . he uses it again when we are out at lunch. Kallan is protesting that there is nothing on the menu that she wants to eat, and Mark grows impatient, “When you start dating, you are going to have to be a little bit more adventurous about what you are willing to eat. You can’t just sit there with your mouth sealed tight, shaking your head like a baby.”
I giggle, which annoys Kallan, and so she sinks angrily beneath the restaurant table and sits on the floor, which in turn annoys Mark, next to whom she is sitting. He leans down to ask her, “Is this what you’re going to do on dates? Slide under the table? Your boyfriends are not going to like this at all.”
Me? DEAD.
8) Kallan contemplates a world in which police are allowed to stop female criminals by grabbing their boobs. She figures this would be a pretty good way to stop female misbehavior, and she imagines the police would have large grabber wands with which they would snap at bad-girl boobs. “Stop in the name of the law or be boob-gripped!” I wonder aloud why the police wouldn’t just perhaps grab these female criminals’ arms, and Kallan stares at me, “In the future, crime-fighting focuses on the boobs, Mom. It’s so obvious.”
Later that night, as we lie in bed, I tell Mark of Kallan’s thoughts on criminal justice, and he says thoughtfully, “Interesting. Of course, this means that in the future, Asian women will just be running amuck.”
So much giggling.
9) I had a bit of an allergic reaction last weekend that left me with a few small injuries where I scratched and bothered irritated skin on my face and neck. One small scabbed scrape is just below my nose, but it has not been an issue as a bit of concealer . . . conceals. Last night, however, as I climbed out of the bathtub and wrapped a towel around my body, Kallan walked past me and then stopped short, “OK, that’s a weird owie. It’s kind of shaped like a heart.” She stood on tiptoe to get a closer look, “It does look like a heart . . . a heart and a mustache at the same time.”
I leaned to look in the mirror, “Yeah, I guess it does look like a little heart mustache. Well, that’s just awesome.”
Kallan giggled, “You look like Hitler in a Valentiney mood.”
Sigh.
