Scooping and Tossing

The other day, I arrived home after a haircut to find my beloved and our son on the driveway. It was warm for this time of year, and they were playing in the slushy snow. This was, in my opinion, an excellent plan given that we'd all been lying around on couches watching Donald Duck videos or doing SuDoKu puzzles most of the week.

An excellent plan, indeed, but not one in which I wanted to take part at that particular moment. I hadn't eaten lunch yet, and it was after 1 PM. I retreated to the kitchen to heat some leftovers.

As the microwave ran, I stood looking out the window above our stove, munching Chex Mix and watching father and son frolic in the snow. They weren't frolicking, exactly. In actuality, our little guy, who had a kid-sized, green plastic shovel in hand, was furiously scooping and tossing snow onto the driveway. Scoop-toss, scoop-toss, scoop-toss. He was really going for it, shoveling for all he was worth--in the wrong direction. (Antishoveling?)

Before my food had heated completely, the entire lane behind my garage stall was speckled with splotches of heavy, wet snow. And Daddy was just standing by idly, letting the boy have his fun.

Then I saw him head for the garage and return with our beefy shove-l. It's a shove-l because you really don't want to lift and dump with it like you would with a lighter version. This substantial hunk of metal on a wooden handle is strictly a pushing implement.

The elder Strandberg, seeing that the younger had tired of his effort to uncover a sizeable patch of lawn, was clearing the driveway again, creating a clean concrete slate. He wasn't angry or annoyed about it; he was just setting things as they should be once again.

Standing in the kitchen watching this silent movie through the windowpane, I saw the scene differently than I would have were I out in the fray. I saw myself, half-crazed and unthinking, digging, digging, digging as though I knew what I were doing--as though I had figured out exactly what it was that would fulfill my life forever, and it was this scooping and tossing, scooping and tossing. Once I was satisfied with my effort, I walked away not even aware that what I had done was worse than unproductive--it was exactly the opposite of what I was intended to do.

And then I saw a Benevolent One who had been standing silently by the entire time--without interfering, without redirecting--step in and clean up the mess. He wasn't bitter about it but rather was a bit bemused.

'She'll figure it out sooner or later,' He thought as He did the heavy lifting once again. 'Until then, I'll just keep shoveling.'

On the First Day of Christmas, My True Love Gave To Me...A (Female) Owl

I had dinner with a dear friend of mine tonight, and I told her that I can tell how well (or, more typically, how poorly) I have been caring for myself by the length of my fingernails and the number of days that have passed between blog posts. So if the 3/8" clippings and the 11-day blog drought are any indication, I have not been at the top of my own list lately.

No, occupying Slots 1-5 were Christmas gifts, Christmas wrapping, Christmas cookies, Christmas meal planning, and...what was that last one? Oh, yeah, now I remember--caring for the family that doesn't shut down when life-blood-sucking holidays come around. Those darn kids still dare to get hungry and soil clothes when I have visions of sugarplums dancing in my head.

The Christmas tide washed in and left in its wake a shallow sea of plastic bits and pieces scattered about our living room. The good news about this is that the kids have been entertaining themselves quite well the past few days. The bad news is that eventually I'm going to have to find places for each new inventory item. Even with the two-garbage-bag sweep that the Grinch made of our toy supply about 30 minutes prior to Santa's arrival, that will be no small feat.

Still, all the extra work the holiday requires, even in the slightly scaled-back form we targeted this year, is worth it for certain priceless moments scattered throughout the day. For one, the kids actually tore themselves away from tearing open presents to eat a sit-down breakfast with their parents and grandparents. That was pretty impressive.

So was the time that our older, "I'll share my stuff tomorrow" child stopped what he was doing to show his younger sister how to get her fingers underneath the creases in the wrapping paper to open her gift.

But most priceless of all was a conversation my daughter and I had about the stuffed owl she received from a great-aunt and -uncle. Plush toys are amazingly lifelike these days, and this bird--which strongly resembles Hedwig from the Harry Potter series--is no exception. Our darling girl took an immediate shine to it and carried it lovingly in her small arms most of the day.

At one point, I wanted to check out the bird's gray feathered wings, and, reaching toward her, I said, "Can I see him, honey?"

Then I caught myself. Why would I either assume the creature was male or automatically assign it a masculine pronoun?

By way of correction, I asked, "Is your owl a boy or a girl, sweetie?"

"I don't know," she said sweetly.

Then she matter-of-factly removed the bird from beneath her arm, deftly turned it over, and grasped its legs to spread them apart.

After a quick glance down, she looked up at me and said, "It's a girl."

The Best Laid Plans...

"Where are we now, Mama?" came the question from the four-year-old in the back seat. It was 8 PM, and we were nearly home from a three-year-old cousin's birthday party in Green Bay.

"We're in the Town of Menasha. Actually, I guess it's the City of Menasha," I responded. Why on earth did I say that?

"If it's a city, why can't I see any skyscrapers?" he asked.

I reiterate: Why did I say that? "Menasha's a small city, and small cities don't have them," I told him without hesitation. I was tired and didn't really want to make conversation.

Following more chatter in the back seat from the two children who I had expected would conk out about five minutes into our 50-minute drive, I said, exasperated, "You kids are supposed to be asleep! That was the plan!"

"Well, that wasn't OUR plan," responded my quick-witted little boy. Touche.

**************

In other news, the penny has resurfaced. The moral of that story: All's well that comes out the other end well.

A Day in the Life

The next time you see a mother of two small children who is looking a bit done in, consider the day she might be having:

- Perhaps she shoveled the sidewalk and driveway in a rush while the kids were eating breakfast before preschool began.

- Maybe she took her younger child to the coffee shop for a quick cup of java before a meeting at church. And maybe, just five seconds after her two-year-old was handed a tiny cup of hot chocolate with whipped cream on top, the sweetie dropped it on the floor in a brown-and-white explosion which covered her little legs with dirt-colored speckles and caused her to burst into inconsolable tears.

- It could be that, once a replacement hot chocolate was procured, the frazzled mother carried both her cup and her daughter's to the parking lot and, in a ridiculous shuffle of keys, purse, and beverages, dropped said replacement onto the front of her fleece and the unforgiving asphalt, evincing more weeping and wailing.

- Inconceivably, the morning's events may have included the sharing of a penny-swallowing story with the other preschool moms which brought on a guffaw so hearty as to launch the Eclipse mint from her mouth and onto the floor at the center of the space in which she and the others were waiting.

- She may have had to root through her daughter's excrement with a sandwich baggie over her hand in search of the coin the little imp had gobbled the previous day.

- It's possible she drove randomly around her small city for 40 minutes trying to get the money-muncher to take a 20-minute restorative nap before a follow-up X-ray to verify that the penny had cleared the esophagus and moved further along the digestive tract.

- She might even have had to whisk her son into the house after an enjoyable hour's romp in the snow because he had wet his jeans, snowpants, socks, and boots. (And then, of course, she would have had to deal with the washing of the child and the clothes.)

And it could very well be that she faced all of this in a single eight-hour period!

But then, you must not forget that she probably ended her day with two small heads resting heavily and contentedly on her shoulders as she read bedtime stories before singing to and tucking her children in for the night. And that tiny fraction of her frustrating day would, of course, have made all the rest worth her while.

Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

Last night I was in the kitchen, minding my own business and making dinner as I generally do between the hours of 5 and 6 PM. My beloved was working, as he has generally been doing between the hours of 6 AM and 6 PM for the last four weeks or so. As such, I was doing what I often do when I truly need to get something done--I was leaving the kids to their own devices in the living room.

They had been having tremendous fun in the fort/igloo I'd made for them out of a large roll of remnant carpeting that's waiting to be cut to fit our 55-degree, tile-floored master bath. I had peeked in on them a few times, and on one of those occasions, our littlest had handed me a penny which I remembered having left atop some laundry headed upstairs. Thinking that I was being fun, I smiled and put it in the kitty pocket on the front of her sweater.

It was just a few minutes later that I heard gagging from the direction of the igloo. Having just renewed my CPR/Heimlich certification, my rescue circuits went into overdrive as I dashed into the living room. The little girl with the kitty pockets was lying on her back on the collapsed fort, her eyes the size of small saucers. (They're the size of small saucers under normal circumstances, so I wasn't sure whether to be alarmed by this or not.)

My mind went immediately to the coin. "Did you put that penny in your mouth?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said plainly.

"And did you spit it out?" I asked, hopeful.

"No," she answered.

"Where is it now?" I asked, less hopeful.

"In my throat," she said. At least it was helpful that she had a vocabulary that enabled her to respond so clearly.

This was the point at which I entered crazed ambivalence. 'Kids swallow coins all the time, right?' I asked myself.

'Oh, most definitely,' part of me said. The other part of me was already flagellating my own back with a horsewhip. What kind of mother would put a penny in her two-year-old's pocket?!

While the money-gulper went about her business, I went about mine--the business of calling those professionals in my life who know what to do in these situations. I started with my sister, who happens to be a pediatric triage nurse and answers questions from lax parents like me--and, I hope, much laxer ones--all day long.

She basically told me that this, too, shall pass (and you know the sense in which I mean that), and that I should watch for respiratory difficulty, vomiting, or fever. That was mildly reassuring, but any advice that contains the words "respiratory distress" is, well, distressing.

Next on the list were my in-laws. She is a retired teacher; he is a pediatrician. Surely one of them had dealt with this at some point? But alas, the doctor was not in the house, and my mother-in-law had been responsible enough a parent not to have faced the coin-in-the-throat scenario. She suggested feeding her a piece of bread to push it through in case it was still stuck in her esophagus.

Finally, I made the call with which I should have started, to NurseDirect, the 24-hour on-call service of our local HMO. These, of course, were the people we'd sue if anything happened to our little girl as a result of inaction, so they recommended, based on the fact that she was pointing down her throat and saying her mouth hurt, that we have her seen immediately.

So off my husband went (she chose him over me, probably because I was the one who indirectly got her in this mess) on his second trip to Immediate Care in less than a month. And he returned just over an hour later with a little girl festooned with stickers and a large chest X-ray which had indeed revealed a penny waiting patiently at the mouth of the stomach.

We fed her some peanut butter bread when she complained that it still hurt, and for a second--we hope it was the second in which the foreign object entered her stomach--she seemed in a world of pain. But then all was well, and she was as chipper as could be.

So for the next couple of days, I'll be on "poop patrol." I suppose it's my due and will reinforce an important lesson learned.

A Most Interesting Discovery

Sometimes you learn the most amazing things about your kids in the most unusual ways. I offer as an example the day last week that I was sitting with our son in the bathroom as he took care of business. (For some reason, he occasionally requests my presence near the potty when nature calls. I think it has to do with having my undivided attention. He knows I can find little else to do while sitting on the step stool as he sits on the throne.)

He was chatting me up from his perch, looking about the room for conversational inspiration, when he spied the plastic tub of flushable "kid wipes" on the shelf next to him. He stared for a second, and then he bemusedly announced, "Hey, that tub says 'Pop-Up' AND 'Pull-Up!'"

He was evidently puzzled by how it could be both simultaneously (with 'Pop-Up' a tub descriptor and 'Pull-Up' the brand name). I, on the other had, was dazzled by the fact that he KNEW it said both of those things. I had never told him so.

"Are you reading that, honey?" I asked.

"Yes," he said tentatively, wondering why I was asking.

Now it was my turn to look around the room in search of something else with which to verify his apparent new skill. But despite the stereotype of the water closet as "reading room," there wasn't any printed matter to be had. In desperation, my eyes lighted on a small bottle of liquid soap resting on the sink.

"Here," I said. "Can you read this?" I held out the bottle with my thumbnail beneath four words spelled out in all caps.

"Hand...and...body...wash," he said, looking to me for approval as soon as he'd finished.

"You're reading!" I said to him, smiling broadly.

I, of course, dove into this reading business head-first, constantly pausing as I read him and his younger sister books to let him noodle out the last word of a line. Sometimes I would urge him to try entire sentences. He quickly tired of this and would growl at me if I pushed him too hard. I was reminded of how I felt when I took differential equations in college. I was pleased with myself when I finally mastered something in that deeply mysterious class, but I wouldn't have wanted someone shoving problems at me all the live-long day so that I could prove myself again and again. So I backed off.

As it turns out, he pulls out this new skill whenever it can be used to his benefit. Last Friday, when we were warming ourselves in a park-and-rec building in preparation for a subzero hayride to see the Christmas lights in our neighborhood, I was trying to keep quiet the fact that Santa was seated in a nearby alcove doling out candy canes in exchange for Christmas lists. I didn't think we had time for the line prior to our 5:25 PM departure on the Frigid Express and figured we'd catch him afterward.

That was not to be the case. Our little guy was absent-mindedly looking around his environs when he saw five letters and an arrow taped to the top of a nearby stairwell.

"SANTA!" he said, heading off in the direction indicated.

And thus was lost another parental advantage. We'll have to be careful to spell only more challenging two-syllable words while he's within earshot.

Life Cereal...And Life and Death

Yesterday morning, the kids and I were in the kitchen eating breakfast. I had the radio tuned to NPR and was half-listening to the news. The reports were dominated by the Saddam Hussein trial, which had started while we were sleeping. I wasn't catching everything that was said (what mother of two ever does?), but I did hear something about the first witness, whose testimony denounced the murder of a 14-year-old boy. With my piecemeal attentiveness, I came to presume that this boy was the witness's son.

The news moved on to other slightly less appalling subjects, but the cast of characters in our kitchen did not.

"Mama," our boy said, "how old was that boy who was killed?"

Oh my. I forget that they're listening all the time. "He was 14," I said.

"Well, how do you think he was killed?" he asked.

This morbid line of questioning did not surprise me much. At present, the little guy is into playing "rescue center" with his Duplos. He builds axes for chopping victims free from burning boats and assembles "journeys" (his adulteration of "gurneys") for transporting the wounded. He also asks where ambulances or fire trucks are going when we hear their sirens in the distance, and when I offer up as innocuous an answer as I can think of, he presses for other possibilities: "What ELSE do you think might have happened, Mama?" It's not unusual for him to request three or four variations.

So when he wanted details on this boy's death, I responded as matter-of-factly as I could. "Somebody probably shot him," I said.

True to form, he asked for more. "Well, how ELSE do you think he could have been killed, Mama?" he said.

I paused before responding as tersely as possible. "He could have been strangled," I said quickly, certain that this was not healthy breakfast banter but not at all sure how to redirect the conversation. I didn't want to discourage him from asking questions, but I also didn't want to terrify the poor kid. As far as he knows, Iraq could be three blocks from here.

There was a brief silence as the kids continued to munch their cereal, and then our firstborn, as though trying to convince himself, said, "I don't think that boy really died, Mama."

Oh, how I wanted to believe him.

More On Laundry...

If you read yesterday's post, you know that laundry's been heavy on my heart (and heavy on my back...hauling all those clothes and linens up two flights of stairs from the basement to our bedrooms is no easy task).

When it comes to clean-clothes handling, I am in the habit of simultaneously folding and sorting by room such that a particular basket heads either to our boudoir or to the hallway between the kids' rooms. It's all about efficiency. I even go so far as to pile our daughter's clothes neatly on one side of the basket and our son's on the other so that the basket can be placed in front of the linen closet between both of their doors for maximum ease in putting things away. (Yes, it's obsessive, but it works for me.)

I had a basket positioned as such the other afternoon and was returning shirts, pants, and PJs to our two-year-old's dresser. Then I noticed that she was removing things from the basket and heading into her brother's room with them.

Curious, I followed her. Was she undoing my hard work and tossing things carelessly to the floor?

No, she was putting them away. And putting them away correctly.

"Pajammies!" she said, and bent to put her brother's footy PJs into the bottom bin of his makeshift dresser--right where they belonged.

She made another trip to the basket for a pile of tiny tighty whities. "Underwear!" she said, again placing them correctly.

She proceeded with pants and socks until the basket was empty and everything had found its appropriate home. Remarkable.

This MUST be an X-linked trait.

The Terrible (Thirty-)Twos

We spent three hours today in and out of the crisp December weather as we partook of the Neenah Community Christmas festivities. We discussed whether or not we'd participate over pancakes this morning.

It didn't take much to sell the kids. I asked our wheel-loving preschooler, "How would you like to go watch Santa Claus hang a wreath on the clock tower near church by climbing up the ladder of a fire truck?"

He gasped, his mouth falling open and his eyes widening. "We get to see Santa Claus AND a fire truck?! We can't miss THAT!" he responded.

Our family time on the town was fun (what's not fun about live reindeer, roasted marshmallows, a gift bag of junky toys from Santa, and all the cookies you can eat?), but we were all hungry and exhausted when we got back home shortly after noon. I started fixing lunch and, in between heating leftovers in the microwave, did the laundry shuffle--clothes from dryer to basket, from washer to dryer, from sorted heap to washer.

I carried the basket upstairs and set it down in the living room next to its sibling, which contained two clean loads of laundry from the previous day. In another hour, two more loads had joined the throng. Soon, seven loads of clothing (was there anything left in our closets?) awaited my attention.

They didn't get my attention until after the lunch dishes were done and the younger child was down for a nap. Now it was midafternoon on a Saturday and I hadn't had but 10 minutes or so of rest. I was growing bitter.

Forty-five minutes later, triumphant after having tackled the mountain of folding and sock-pairing, I sat down on the sofa with a magazine. Enter our son asking me to play cars and trucks. I put on my Dutiful Mother hat and flopped to the floor to join him.

Not long after that, my beloved made me a perfect cup of tea and began preparing dinner. He had a 6 PM social outing and was making a point of pitching in before he disappeared. But the washerwoman was not satisfied by this effort. And she was tired.

After the blood-pressure-raising process of getting the kids to put their toys away, I asked them to head upstairs to pick out their pajamas (this is an important thing to them). When they kept giggling as though they hadn't heard me, I thundered, "WORDS ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH BUT NO ONE IS LISTENING TO THEM! THESE ARE THE STAIRS, AND 'UP' IS THAT WAY!"

That got some hustle out of them. But in short order, the dawdling recommenced. Bedtime always goes this way, but I'm not always the howling hag I was tonight.

"Get your pajamas on or we're not going to read books!" I shouted. Why was I shouting?

I tried to soften my blustery speech. "I'm sorry, kids," I said. "Mommy's been really shouty tonight, hasn't she?"

"Yes," said our son. "Why are you so shouty?"

Good question.

"Well, because everyone else got to play and rest today, and Mommy wanted to play and rest, too. But I don't feel like I got to relax," I said. Wah wah wah.

In his infinite wisdom, my boy responded, "You're going to get to relax in just a couple minutes, Mama."

We moved on to brushing teeth. The practice in our home is that the kids brush on their own first, and then one of us gives them a once-over just to be sure.

"Let me have a little turn now," I said to our two-year-old, who was mostly sucking on the bristles of her toothbrush.

Seems the kids were giving me a little wider berth at this point, because she responded, "You can have a big one if you want to, Mama."

Even that didn't keep me from launching into a tantrum when our son refused the stitched-up-chin ointment I'd brought into his room on my finger, insisting that he wanted to squeeze it out of the tube himself. In an attempt at compromise, I transferred the stuff I had onto his finger. When he defiantly reached to wipe it on his sheets, I grabbed his wrist, looked at him with fire in my eyes, and stormed off to the bathroom to get the tube. Wails of indignity ensued.

When I came back with the ointment, I snuggled him and apologized, telling him I was sorry I had been mean but that I didn't like wasting things. Then I asked him to forgive me. We cleared up what forgiveness was, and I repeated my request for it.

"I'll forgive you in 24...weeks," he said. "When will that be?"

"Umm...it'll be about May," I responded. "Just before summer starts."

"Well," he said, "maybe in 14 weeks, then." Guess that will have to do.

This Is The Way We WHAT?!

While big brother was off at preschool on Friday morning, I spent some time sweeping the kitchen and cleaning off the dining room table/"horizontal file" in preparation for a lunch date with my girlfriend and her kids. Our mail generally makes it to the "corner" of our oval-shaped table and no further until I deal with it. Often in situations like the one I found myself in that morning, it makes a short hop over to the no-man's land of our buffet, where it can sometimes rest undisturbed for months. But this time I was making a dedicated effort to sort it into piles for response and recycling.

This sifting and winnowing takes some focus, especially when additional categories like "hang on the bulletin board" or "put into the pile of coupons under the fruit bowl in the kitchen" come into play. As I worked with some determination, I heard a song wafting in from the adjacent living room.

"This is the way we brush the dog, brush the dog, brush the dog...this is the way we brush the dog so early in the MOR-NING," sang our two-year-old girl.

'Well, isn't that precious,' I thought, keeping my nose to the grindstone and not turning around to see what she was doing. If she was content, I figured, so was I.

Then came the second verse:

"This is the way we brush the ceiling way up high, brush the ceiling way up high, brush the..."

Ceiling? What? I spun on my heel for a visual. There stood our tiny little wisp of a girl, gripping with both hands the blue broom I'd left leaning against the wall, its handle at a 90-degree angle to the floor and completely over her head. The bristles were within a foot and a half of their target.

I hated to stifle her creativity but decided to retrieve the broom before it came crashing down onto her cranium or my laptop. A part of me was really sorry to miss the next stanza.

This Won't Hurt A Bit (At Least Not Until Later)

Our four-year-old son's courage in getting his stitches put in last weekend (he even wanted to watch "Anaconda," which was on TV in his hospital room while he waited) had us so impressed that we had assumed he was rolling with this latest challenge. I was reminded a few days later, though, of a lesson I learned so painfully in junior high: Sometimes things people say hurt a whole lot more than falling on the stairs and splitting your chin open.

We were in the car driving to church for Cherub Choir. Both my cherubs were in the back quietly looking out their windows. Then, out of the blue, big brother piped up.

"The next time you and Rachel go somewhere, Mama, can we get a babysitter?" he asked.

I wasn't too sure what he was getting at. "Why do we need to get a babysitter, honey?"

"Because I don't want anyone to ask me why I got my stitches," he said.

My heart began to ache. "Did someone say something about your stitches?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Two kids at preschool."

I paused to get into the head of a four-year-old. "Well, sweetie, they were probably just asking about them because they think they're cool. Lots of kids think stitches are cool," I said, sincerely believing this to be true from my experience as a kid.

His response, simple and laden with emotion, told me he felt otherwise.

"They're not cool," he said.

The Strandbergs' First Stitches

It was early in the afternoon on Sunday, November 27, our actual sixth anniversary. (We had celebrated the occasion two days earlier by taking 30 blissful hours away from the kids. We love our children, but we do appreciate getting a chance to love each other--and I mean that in the purest, most wholesome sense, for those of you who went directly elsewhere.) I was cleaning up after a lunch of Thanksgiving leftovers, and our dear aunt was moving about the house on a hunting-and-gathering expedition as she prepared to head back to Kalamazoo. It was a relaxed, peaceful time.

Then came the thud, followed in quick tempo by the bellowing, all just outside the kitchen door. The distorted voice was that of our son, who under normal circumstances is not a crier. He can run head-first into a wall, shrug, and keep on running. He recently got a flu shot with no reaction beyond a tiny flinch. (The same was true for his do-exactly-what-big-brother-does little sister.) So when I heard him wailing sincerely and without a hint of fatigue, I got a little worried.

I hurried over to discover our son sprawled on the three steps that lead from our pseudo-mud room to our kitchen hallway. He did not look happy.

I quickly discerned that in the three or so seconds it had taken me to arrive on the scene, he had gone from pained to angry. This fall was a grave injustice, and he was clearly displeased. I sat on the stairs and took him into my lap to assess the damage.

"Show Mama where it hurts, honey," I said.

"RrrrRRRRrrr," he said, tucking his chin into his right shoulder. At least I knew where to look.

A little crescent of blood stained his shirt where his chin had been. With a little more concern, I said, "Let me see."

After a few more duck-and-cover maneuvers, his shirt had four little blood-moons on it. I finally managed to lift his jaw enough to check the wound. It did not look good. There wasn't much blood, but the gore factor was high enough to raise my anxiety. I didn't think this crack in his chin was going to heal properly without medical attention beyond a Dora the Explorer Band-Aid, which was the best I had to offer.

"I think he needs stitches," I said, not at all sure I was right. But off he went to the ER with his dad while I stayed home with a napping younger child. This seemed like the stuff of male bonding.

And it was. When the two of them arrived home two hours later, they were in good humor.

"Was that topical chocolate used as anesthetic?" I asked, eyeing the brownish oval around his mouth.

"Well, sort of," responded Daddy. "Dairy Queen was the little guy's choice. When I asked him what kind of ice cream he wanted, he said, 'Well, um--chocolate, of course!'"

There was naturally much ado over the four stitches that made the brave little fellow, whom the ER doc deemed "his best patient all day," look like he had a tiny black goatee. With all of us ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, the wounded party wanted to see them himself, so we went to get the camera.

"Look up at the ceiling so Daddy can take a picture," I said. "Then you can see what they look like."

Obediently, he turned his face upward.

"Cheese!" he said.