I’ve no doubt that you will all be relieved to know that W.C. Fields has been captured. They found him at some kind of Concept Therapy Institute which appears to be a place designed to help people deal with stress. Clearly life at the monkey compound got to be too much for him. I wonder if it was helping his child study for a spelling test that finally pushed him over the edge and made him seek out mental help?
So I never managed to write about what we did last weekend. And, honestly, consider yourself spared because it was a lot of blah, blah, blah with some boring and college football squeezed in for good measure.
But there was one moment that I wanted to record for posterity.
We ended up spending Saturday afternoon over at Gulley’s house. The kids played in the backyard while we solved several of the world’s most serious problems. At one point I even offered to pay them a nickel for every stick they picked up out of the yard because I harbored some grand delusions about turning them into a fall centerpiece for my dining room table.
Jackson and Caroline were all over this. They picked up every stick they could find. As opposed to Will who looked me dead in the eye and said, “I hate nickels.” Caroline told me later that he told her he hated money and she declared that his wife was “GOING TO BE SAD ABOUT THAT”.
Preach it, sister.
Anyway, around 4:00, Gulley’s husband announced that he was going to go dove hunting and said the boys could go with him if they wanted to. Will immediately jumped at the chance and ran to his room to put on his favorite shark t-shirt before he rethought that decision due to his concern that the shark would scare away all the doves.
Jackson initially said he wanted to go as well, but I’d also told him he could come over to our house for dinner so he and Caroline could hang out a little longer. He was torn. It was an eight year old version of Sophie’s Choice and he declared that he was going to flip a coin to make his decision.
Caroline yelled out that she wanted to be tails as Jackson found a quarter in Gulley’s purse. He flipped the coin, looked at it, and Gulley and I both watched as he nonchalantly flipped it over to where it revealed tails as opposed to heads. He said, “Looks like I’m going home with y’all”.
And so he did.
We ate dinner and dipped mass quantities of Halloween Oreos in glasses of milk until Gulley came to pick him up around 8:30.
Caroline has no idea what an achievement it is to get a boy to stay home and hang out with her instead of going hunting.
It’s a feat I’ve never managed to pull off in thirteen years of marriage.