Slippiness

I was at home with the kids all day, and we wrestled, read, and tried to make fudge. For some reason, that particular treat is eluding our know-how this year – I’m usually pretty good at it. This year – two batches were bad.

The making of it today went something like this: LD & I first tried to clean up the kitchen, unloading the clean dishes from the dishwasher & loading up the dirty ones, while LG would randomly pull things off of shelves, out of drawers, out of the garbage. She would then try to shove it into the dishwasher, into drawers, into boxes of cereal, while we tried to keep up.

Eventually we pulled ahead of her swath of destruction, and got to the actual cooking part. Last week when we tried, it came out like sludgey chocolate frosting – not horrible, but not at all solid. Today… it came out really crumbly while mixing, then hardened into steel nuggets of doom. Trying to bite into one invited the possibility of tooth destruction.

Another of LGs friends from Kindergarten came over, and the two of them went off and did things that five year old boys do for a few hours: made guns, played in the snow (yep, it’s still around – I think this is the 5th day), made up games with malleable rules. Lunch came around, and we all enjoyed pizza… I’m thinking that I like Papa John’s the best, go figure.

LG napped part of the time that the boys were playing; after she woke up, I tried reading a little to her, first one of her picture books, then Harry Potter, but she wasn’t in the mood. She really just wanted to be spun around and hugged. She’s a bit on the snotty side, I don’t think she’s feeling so hot. We played a game where I’d hide her water bottle and she’d run off and find it.

After L came home from a short day (of a short week) of work, I made up dinner and got the kids in the bath. L was watching the news, and they’d been talking about sledding a lot. We hadn’t taken them out to sled at any point during the snow storm, and L said that we really ought to do it. I agreed. I got LG into bed (she was crabby), telling LD to get out of the bath so we could go sledding.

Man, that kid can move like greased lightning when he want to. He was out of the bath and into his outdoor clothes in about 1.5 seconds. I made him dry his hair, though that was a chore as he didn’t know WHY he had to have dry hair when we were going out into 25 degree weather. Once I asked him what water did when it got really cold, he stopped fidgeting.

It was seven o’clock as we left the house, his normal bed time. We went to LH, a local community center to find some hills. The hills were at the top of a huge playfield, and the entire place was like one big ice sheet – the snow had melted during the day, and refrozen by the time we got there. It was a struggle getting up the hill, but we managed. I let him go on the first run on the red disc, and he went flying. When he hit the bottom of the hill, someone had made a little snow/ice ramp, and he caught it perfectly, grabbing some serious air. He frikkin’ loved it!

The disc went sliding about 75 yards or so across the field, his peals of laughter echoing through the park. The dozen or so high-schoolers were cheering him on, thinking it was hilarious also. He came running back, and I took my turn – it was insanely fast. It wasn’t a huge hill, but the ice made the speeds crazy.

It was rough getting back up the hill, but I managed to MacGyver some steps to the top, using an old steel commuter cup that I found laying there. LD thought they were great – he ran around telling all the other ids… “kids”, yeesh, they were between 15 and 20 … about the stairs, and all of a sudden we had the most popular spot. Still, in spite of the steps, the iciest spot was at the top of the hill – if you weren’t holding tightly to the fence, there was 0% chance of staying upright for more than 20 seconds. There were some nasty spills up there – one girl really smacked her head hard, but she said that she was fine. She was worried initially, asking about the loud crack she’d heard, and we told her that it was her toboggan breaking, not her head – she seemed relieved.

LD spent the next hour racing up and down the hill, sometimes taking bad falls, but always laughing, brushing it off and heading back up for more. He kept losing his hat and mittens, but didn’t seem to affected by the cold – it was probably all the hill climbs he was doing. It was a fantastic evening – bright, clear, not too crowded, and LD seemed to be having the time of his life.

When it came time to go, there were no complaints, just a constant train of narration coming from the little guy. He kept talking about what he had done, how he had done it, did you see that papa, that hurt when I did that but it was ok not too bad… all the way to the car. Then in the car and all the way home – it was great.

He didn’t really seem to have any problems getting ready for bed, but the evening ended on a sour note, unfortunately. He got his PJs on, then got in bed, after both L & I reminded him to brush his teeth multiple times. When I went in to tuck him in, I asked him if he had brushed – he replied yes, but hid his mouth under the covers. I asked him three times, each time telling him that if he wasn’t telling the truth, I’d be mad, but each time he said that he had brushed them. I told him I was going to check to see if the brush was wet… at which time he jumped out of bed and ran for the bathroom, but I was already holding the dry toothbrush.

I was angry, and I let him know it. I don’t like being lied to – who does, really? LD knows that, and he’s been working on his poker face, something I’m not keen on him perfecting. Tonight, he got the point, I think. I let him know that he was not to lie to me, not ever, for any reason – if he did something wrong and lied about it, it would be ten times worse than if he just told us the truth. I let him know that he might get in trouble for doing something wrong and telling us, but it’d be much worse if he didn’t tell us, or worse yet, if he lied.

I walked away, telling him to go to bed. He did, and I could hear the sobbing coming from his room; it was breaking my heart. L finally went in and comforted him, being the good cop, then brought him out to apologize. He did, and it was as sincere an apology as I’ve ever heard from a five year old; I told him I wasn’t mad at him any more, and hoped that he’d learned his lesson. I took him back to bed, tucked him in, and he seemed like he got it.

The whole lying thing is a serious slippery slope.