not-so-sticky

One of the many unfortunate occurrences of growing older is that you lose the enthusiasm for the simple things. Riding the subway is still an exciting adventure but not for the same reasons you believed as a kid. You wait for the time of your life in which there is no one to make you go to bed at a certain hour. You're going to stay up all night! You realize as you're working the graveyard shift that staying up all night isn't all it was cracked up to be in your head. I remember when I was 8, I thought there was nothing better to eat than frozen concentrated orange juice. One of my first chores was to mix the juice and I couldn't help but steal a few bites of the frozen bits. When I grew up, I intended to stockpile my freezer with it and eat nothing else! No one would ever make me eat canned asparagus again. It was going to be all about the concentrate. Today was a day both Seth and I have been looking forward to for a long time. Years, in fact. Seth had been asking to ...

Tonight we registered Seth for the Fall semester at Coleman Catholic. They gave us a ballpoint pen that said "Coleman" on it. I gave them a check for the deposit. Seth, Lily and I likely looked a bit lost upon entering and a student a couple of years older than Seth approached us. Looking lost, he correctly assumed we were there for registration and pointed us - unsolicited - in the right direction. Lily was very excited to be going to school. She pretends to go to school a lot at home, in which she straps on a back pack and runs circles around the house, trying to catch the bus. She doesn't really know much about what it is, only that Seth goes there everyday at the same time she goes to Evie's. Coleman looks like you've stepped inside a time machine and traveled back about 60 years. It's clean and well-maintained but its lecture hall where we met for registration was furnished with rows of uncomfortable wooden seats that looked like they had been bolted in ...

Lily's discovery of the chocolate in Seth's room led me to my own discovery. First of all, Seth had never put his Christmas stocking into the attic when we put away the rest of the Christmas decorations. This was the first of many violations. I scanned the room to see if mischievous hands had broken into anything else. I found that it was difficult to tell if anything had been manhandled. This was because there did not appear to be any order to this room. Truly the black hole that is Seth's closet is growing in mass and expanding its chaos to take over the entire room. Of further interest was the randomness of the disorder. It was as if the disorder itself was planned. It seemed too disorderly to not be concocted. Dana began to laugh, "and Seth told me he brought all of the cups out of his room!" Sometimes there is a shortage of cups in the kitchen cabinet. Most often these cups can be found in Seth's room. I could easily see how Seth could miss some of these ...

There is a room across the hall from mine that I would like to frequent far more often than I do. However, it's a room full of small chokey things and irresistible gadgets that I could not possibly bring Liam and escape with toddler unharmed. I remember the first time that Lily was allowed entrance to Seth's room for a brief moment. Upon entry, a loud and joyful 'ohhhhh!' came out of her little mouth. Older brothers are so awesome. They have the coolest things. It's only 7:16 PM, but everyone in the house was exceptionally sleepy so we retired upstairs even earlier than usual tonight. Dad is settled in (a long day he had...) and snoozing in the next room. Liam and Dana are sound asleep, and Lily is lying next to Dana now, mostly asleep but whispering things to herself. Instead of writing in my dark room of slumbering people, I am sitting across the hall in the secret retreat that is Seth's. Once Seth actually hid me in his room for awhile. The downstairs was jus...