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Things I Don't Know

I don't know what color to paint my hallways. (This may be happening on Monday, due to a guy my father-in-law knows who paints houses for cheap and has time to do something at our house on Monday and the only paintable area that won't require a whole lot of pre-painting cleanup in my house right now is the hallways.) Do you have to stick with something neutral? A Flax, perhaps? An Oatmeal? A Linen? I don't what any kind of neutral with a hint a yellow, which is what we have now and I hate. A brownish neutral may hide dirt. But really in my house the threat is not so much dirt as it is a toddler with free access to markers. And jelly. I guess that's what washable paint (is it semi-gloss? I know so little about paint!) is for.

I don't know what set Phoebe off last night. We were reading a Maisy book together. (Incidentally. Have you ever seen the Maisy cartoons on Noggin? They're pretty low-tech. They look just like the Maisy books -- 2-D characters and settings, about four colors, nothing fancy at all. They don't even make the characters' mouths move along with their voices. But the credits for these cartoons go on forever! They must have one hundred animators on staff. For what, I wonder? For why? What are these people doing that they need so many of them?) Phoebe was lifting the flaps and saying "Allo!" (she says "Allo" for hello, as though she's French! She even calls the phone the "Allo!" She's so cute!) to Charlie and Cyril and Tallulah and "Maze." Then we got to a page with flower flaps that opened up to reveal bugs. Phoebe would lift a flap and say, "Buzz!" and giggle wildly. Oh, the hilarity. But then suddenly she pointed to a bug and said, "Dees!" "This?" I said. "DEES!" she said. "Bees?" I guessed. "NO! DEES!" she said, and burst into tears. I kept trying to guess. "Three? These? ABCs? Flies? Dinosaurs?" but I just wasn't getting it, and my stupidity made her so furious that she threw the book off the bed and refused to read any more. Baby, if you only knew how hard it will be to make yourself understood when you're thirteen, you'd save those tears.

I don't know how to stop using so many parentheses when I write. It's possible I don't know how to spell parentheses.

I don't know what it's going to take to get me out of bed earlier in the morning. We're always running late. Before children I was never late anywhere and now I'm never on time. I hate that, it's annoying. And you'd think it'd be a simple problem to solve but for some reason it's not.

I don't know where to send Mallory to kindergarten.

I don't know how to keep up with Mallory's questions. Last week she asked, "How do you get to heaven?" I just sat there for a minute, because I wasn't sure if she needed to hear 1) You have to be very very good or 2) You have to be dead. Turns out she meant neither, because she then asked, "Do you have to walk?"

"Oh, no, I don't think you have to walk," I said.

"So then do you just kind of..." and she made a little twirly motion with her hand, "...dissolve?"

"Maybe. Maybe you do dissolve."

"Or does God come to get you?"

"Well, maybe. Or maybe an angel comes to get you."

She laughed. "Yeah! And you could ride on its wings!"

I don't know if what I told her was true. I do know that I'm glad that, for now at least, she trusts me enough to ask.

Comments

aimee said…
Oh, I needed a good laugh today. Thnnks!
Noah went through the frustrating stage of not being understood. Actually it is still happening because he can't pronounce things like "grass" so I think he says glass and he ends up yelling at me. Yikes!
aimee said…
Oh, yes, semi gloss or high gloss is best when small children are around.

And you could go with any color, as long as it is warm looking (greenish-brown, cream, brown)
Anonymous said…
If you don't want a yellow tint, you could go with a bluish color. And yes, definitely a gloss or semi-gloss.

Poor Phoebe. Who will ever know what she was trying to say?

Mom
H Noble said…
I think Aim and Karen have established what kind of paint you need, so I won't bother.

Its interesting that you think you use too many parentheses. When A and I used to write notes in junior high, I always loved that she would use parentheses, sometimes so many that I would lose track of the original thought! I think I've picked that up from her a little. I think its a fun way to be yourself, especially since emotions can be difficult via text.
H

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