ever-fixed mark

Overheard:

Minor: “Funny?”

Husband: “No, it’s not funny. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. Hitting is not funny. Biting is not funny. You know what’s funny? Pratfalls are funny. Can you do any pratfalls?”

It’s not often that the pharmaceutical and mommy domains of my life intersect, but here you go: Placebo pills for kids.

I think if it’s unethical to give placebos to adults, then it’s unethical to give them to kids, too — not to mention that it’s unhealthy to model taking unnecessary drugs.

Husband says it’s harmless, like a kiss on a boo-boo.

What do you think?

Friday was yet another opportunity for Husband and me to celebrate our triskadekaversary. We lined up a (free) babysitter (thank you, C! Thank you!), but I wasn’t in the mood to go out for a formal dinner. I told Husband that the one child-free experience I was really craving was an hour on the lake in my kayak. Husband doesn’t kayak, but I promised him an hour lakefront with a book and a beer, unmolested by infant demands. He agreed, and we bought a six-pack of Hefeweizen and tied up the kayak.

When we got to the lake, though, we discovered we had forgotten the bottle opener. “We’ll figure something out, right?” I said.

“I might, but you’re going to be in the middle of the lake,” Husband pointed out.

I put a beer in my boat anyway.

The weather was perfect — sunny, warm, not too windy, but not too still and buggy, either. After about half an hour of paddling I started thinking about that beer. I examined the cap, thinking maybe it was a twist-off after all, but no such luck. The bottle cap even bore the words, “Use Bottle Opener,” no doubt to forestall lawsuits brought by plaintiffs like myself who found themselves without a churchkey.

I did have a regular key, though, and I tried to use it to pry the cap off. There was a little hissing sound of air escaping from the bottle, but I made no real progress. By now I was really thirsty and beginning to feel that my pride was at stake. It was a pretty sad state of affairs if, after three years in the Peace Corps, I couldn’t open a simple beer bottle without aid of modern technology. Really, I might as well hang up my Birkenstocks.

What would MacGyver do?

I surveyed the equipment at hand: Key. Child’s lunch box. Sigg water bottle. Volume 4 of The Raj Quartet. Hair band. Thousands of gallons of water. And…kayak.

The kayak has a lip around the cockpit coaming that is used to attach a spray skirt. I positioned the bottle with the cap under the lip and cracked it down. There was a gentle “poof” and then the cap came right off. I lost some beer due to the fact that the bottle was almost upside down when it opened, but other than that it worked like a charm. It was the best beer I’d ever had.

When I got back to shore, Husband had also managed to open his beer, but there was blood and broken glass involved. Score one for Peace Corps ingenuity.

When the boys were babies, they were terrible sleepers, and Husband and I spent hours and hours singing them to sleep. Naturally, we chose songs that we liked and to which we knew all the words: Springsteen, Dylan, and Tull for Husband, and Joni Mitchell, Elvis Costello, and Ben Folds Five for me. (Sample inappropriate sleepytime lyric: “Give me my money back, you bitch.”)

The boys are older now, though, and their tolerance for a capella has diminished. Aitch doesn’t like us to sing to him at all, and gets especially wiggy when Husband and I sing in unison. Minor only likes songs he already has heard a thousand times, which creates a Catch-22 situation that sounds an awful lot like “The Wheels on the Bus (Go Round and Round).” If I sing a song that’s not on his mental set list he complains about it, in his very Minor-like way of letting you know when every little detail in his world is not precisely to his liking.

A few weeks ago, I slipped a new song into my nighttime repertoire: “Rubber Ducky.” At first, Minor put up with it, probably because he had heard it on “Sesame Street.” But when I got to the part that goes, “Every day when I make my way to my tubby…” he didn’t recognize it as part of the same song and started whining: “No not that song other song Mommy other song Mommy OTHER SONG!”

“Relax, honey, it’s just the bridge,” I told him, and started the familiar part again.

The next few times I sang it, he did the same thing. I tried to head him off at the pass by distracting him during that section. I would put my head close to his and then rub noses when we got to “Rub-a-dub-dubby.” Eventually he twigged to the fact that it was part of the song. Now as soon as I begin to sing “Rubber ducky, you’re the one…” he begins chanting, “Every day Mommy every day mommy EVERY DAY.” When we get to the bridge he rubs my nose and laughs.

I don’t know that it’s that great of a story, but it’s one of those little fleeting things that gets replaced by other routines pretty quickly, and I wanted to remember it.