On Boys: From Annie

She hasn't really met R yet, so I forgive her for the semi-sexist ending, but nonetheless, I found this reassuring -- my son, just three, has already broken two windows in my house -- and I feel for our poor neighbors almost every day:

"I have a lovely new neighbor across the street. His name is S.; he's around 50, single, n/d (no dogs) n/k (no kids).

We are a family w/d and w/k. S. very pleasantly informed me this morning that something was dangling from my third floor window, wrapped around a telephone wire and hanging over the street. "Just a parasoralophas (editors note: a dinosaur with a horn from the back of the head that made a trumpet type sound)" I said. "Batman's hanging out the back window and in fact, he doesn't fly. Just in the movies."

I make these matter-of-fact statements like I'm simply breathing. I've become oblivious to the faces of persons with n/d and n/k.

My middle son has intense curiosity for all around him. Why don't chickens bury their eggs like turtles do? What is different and what is the same? Beats me. All I know is that when I went to make breakfast there were no eggs in the fridge. Not ONE. They were indeed, buried in the garden and being watered everyday. I don't know what his hypothesis is, but I do know my yard is going to smell like hell at some point, probably soon (sorry S.).

There was the day I thought my son had head lice. I took him to a hairdresser/lice specialist, disinfected my home, laundered every single piece of bed linen, had all the dogs groomed and slathered all heads in pesticides. It was an unhappy day. Next morning, a girlfriend on the playground (in "the yard" as we call it) says, "So...how was it washing all that grape soda out of your sons hair? He was tossing it up like peanuts at the baseball field and trying to catch it in his mouth...sooo funny."

(Crystallized sugar looks like lice. Boy was under husband's care).

Boys LOVE my house. It is full of critters and the backyard is full of things you can just pick and eat in the summer. Beans and peaches and raspberries. Blueberries and tomatoes. There's a working well here and a hen house we haven't quite crafted for foul but it is great to lock other kids inside.

Other moms say, "They like HER house because she has no rules", but I do have rules starting with the Golden Rule. But I don't have rules about micro waving a marshmallow until it becomes the size of a loaf of bread. I don't have rules about rolling every inch of tin foil in a 200 square foot package to see how big it is, how much it weighs, how it dents when it is airborne. The experiments are endless. The curiosity is endless. Labrador retrievers, notorious for their appetites, will even eat a sandwich after you've urinated on it (hypothesis proved; please do not try at home).

My boys hate girls because they have to. They hate everything about them: Barbies, pink, ballet, dress-up, painted nails (all the things I am wistful for), but they secretly adored the girls who moved from Scott's house. My boys did not want them to move. I apologized in advance before he and the Home Inspector were hailed with mud-balls, and after, when coins (lots) were adhered to his driveway with bubble-gum.

S. picked up the coins, goo-be-goned them off and so, I guess, the jokes on them. Boys will be boys."