She freaks me out

Have you ever had to work with someone who seems, well, unhinged? You know, the kind where under their yearbook photo was 'Voted Most Likely to Go Postal'? The kind of person who skulks around, pops up in the strangest places, spends way too much time in the bathroom and constantly mumbles to themselves? I have my eye on her. If I disappear from the internets, you know who to look for.......

When I was pregnant with Levi, Chris would always talk to my tummy. He would say, 'I love you baby. I love you. Pick up your socks. ' Every time, pick up your socks. His theory was that if it takes you telling a child a thousand times to do something before it sinks in, he was going to get a head start. So fast forward almost 5 years and let's see how that is working out. Yesterday, when I got home from work I found one shoe in the middle of the back yard, a sock on the patio, a shirt on the kitchen floor and shorts in the middle of the living room. (Oh, and I found Levi in his tighty whities and nothing else) Chris's theory? Not so successful.

So why was Levi sans clothes yesterday? Apparently he was playing in the sandbox and decided to see how it felt to fill his pants with sand. So he did. And it didn't feel very good. (Go figure) And that precipitated a strip-down to get the itchy sand off of him. I walked in just in time to keep him in his underwear long enough to get to the bathroom and start the tub filling. Boys. Bananas on the treadmill, sand in their pants. I just don't get how their little minds work.

I now understand the family that lived down the street from us when I was little. They had 6 boys, all about a year apart in age. We lived in a little neighborhood of identical houses in neat little rows with quiet winding streets. Every house was the same except for color. It was all very 'cloned' in a suburban way. Every house except theirs. One window was broken out and covered with plastic (the victim of an errant baseball). A few shingles were missing where the boys had gone sledding off the roof one winter. The tree in the front yard was dead, as was all the grass that had been worn away by games of kickball. The garage door hung crookedly after they rammed their go cart into it repeatedly. But the thing I remember the most was how the mother would come after those boys, screaming like a banshee, and waving a piece of hot wheels track (remember the plastic bendable pieces of track you could snap together?) She would get a hold of one boy and drag him home, beating him with the track the whole way. The rest of the boys would slink off and hide for a good long while, knowing that once she found them they were in for the same fate. I wasn't allowed to play with those boys. Ever. But I wanted to! I especially wanted to know what they did that made their mother act that way......

I have a little more respect for that woman now.