Author: Shane

What the grumbles?

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Ollie picked up a habit somewhere of saying, “What the heck?” We’re not sure where he got that from. I don’t think Sara or I say “What the heck” very much. Maybe from school? Anyway, he didn’t just say, “what the heck,” he was living “what the heck”. He said it, like, once every 30 seconds.

It didn’t bother me too much, but it was driving Sara crazy. It got to the point that every time he said it, I could see Sara cringe. Finally, she told him it was rude, and asked him to say something else instead. After deliberating about it for awhile, he came up with, “What the grumbles?”

What the grumbles?

Now, this is just about the best swear ever. Obviously, it’s best delivered by a just-turned-five year old with a bit of difficulty with his ‘R’s, of course (“What the gwumbles?”), but I find myself taking any opportunity to say it.

A just plain, “What the grumbles?” when something strange happens is the best, but there are other opportunities as well: “What the grumbles was that?” or, “What in the grumbles is going on in here?”

So this is totally a thing now. Feel free to start saying it yourself. Drop it into conversations. Say it at work.

Come on, you know you want to.

What the grumbles?

The Shadow Man

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The other night, Ollie was crying before bed.

“What’s the matter, buddy?” I asked him.
“I’m scared to go to sleep.”
“Why?”
“Every night a man comes into my room while I’m sleeping. He picks me up and he dumps me on the floor.”
“A man dumps you on the floor?”
“Yes. The Shadow Man. He’s hard to see in the dark, but his legs are as tall as my room. He lives in a cave behind my bookshelf. When it’s night he goes through a tunnel to the shelf above my bed. He uses his tools and he opens up the star [that hangs on the wall above my head]. That’s how he comes into my room. He picks me up in the air and drops me onto the floor. It hurts and I don’t want him to drop me anymore.”

Kids have such an amazing, vivid imagination. They tell you with utmost sincerity these crazy things that they imagine, and they have so many details, so much texture, that you can’t help but believe them, just a little bit. I’ll tell you, lots of writers can’t manage to paint a picture the way Ollie does about the Shadow Man. The more he talked about the Shadow Man, the more the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Imagine how terrifying that would be, if you truly believed it (and he definitely does).

“Ollie, the Shadow Man’s not real. It’s just a bad dream.”
“It’s not just a bad dream! Sometimes I wake up on the floor!”

Well, it’s hard to argue with that logic, although a nebulous Shadow Man who lives in the wall is a long way to go to explain waking up on the floor. I mean, there’s a decidedly more straightforward explanation…

Regardless, I couldn’t shake him on the idea. If he slept, a 12 foot tall man made out of shadows would creep into his room and toss him from his bed. I finally got him to go to sleep by insisting that all daddies had magic songs they sang to weave an invisible blanket of protection over their children from the time they were babies. When it comes to making up stories, two can play at that game!

“Ollie, what if we turned you around so that your head was at the other end of the bed?”
“Yeah, that might work. The Shadow Man would try to pick me up and just get my feet. So he’d probably get frustrated and go away.”

Makes sense.

He got by the next few nights by sleeping clutching a flashlight (I mean, hey, imagine how deadly a flashlight would be to a dude made out of shadows!), but I got tired of sneaking in and turning it off after he was asleep. So finally I put a nightlight in his room.

Now, so far this is pretty straightforward fare. I mean, lord knows how terrified of the dark I was, and Evie as well, so I didn’t exactly see the next turn coming.

“Ollie, how is the nightlight working? Are you sleeping better now.”
“I don’t like it.”
“No? Are you still not sleeping well? Is it not bright enough?”
“No, I’m not waking up at all…I’m lonely. It’s too bright. The Shadow Man isn’t coming anymore.”
“Wait, you want him to come? You…miss the Shadow Man?”
“It just gets lonely at night without him.”

Parenting is confusing.

Quote Monday has its faults

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Me: “That was my fault in school: talking too much.”
Sara: “I didn’t have any faults.”

And humble, too!

Evie, breathlessly: “I look beautiful. I look like…a mom!”

Question our decision not to have a tv all you want; my 7 year old thinks the definition of beauty is, “a mom”. 😛

Sara: “The easiest way to tell if it’s a mammal is if it has fur.”
Evie: “Humans don’t have fur! Well, daddy does.”

Elephant Trunks

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For Christmas, Ollie made Grandma Kathy and Grandpa Ron some “elephant trunks”, made out of the cardboard tube from the inside of wrapping paper rolls. He also gave them a couple of extra elephant trunks, “in case [they] wanted to play with other people.”

Well, Grandma Kathy *did* want to play elephant with other people, and made Ollie a birthday video to prove it.

Enjoy:

X’s and O’s, an explanation

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In order to keep everything 100% scientific, I wanted the poll first, before the explanation, so as not to bias anybody. Naturally, once you hear my incredibly-correct explanation, your votes would immediately be swayed. 🙂 So if you haven’t voted yet, do that first, then come back here.

Back? Okay.

It came up the other day that Sara and I didn’t agree on the meaning of the X’s and O’s at the bottom of a letter. Letters to your loved ones are sometimes signed “XOXOXO” or “XXX OOO”. As far as I know, either version is read as “hugs and kisses”.

But which ones are the hugs, and which ones are the kisses? I don’t believe anybody ever explained it in that detail; it was always just “hugs and kisses”.

Sara’s understanding was that the O’s were hugs and the X’s were kisses. The O’s represented the big round circle of your arms, and the X’s are like puckered lips. My understanding was that the X’s were hugs and the O’s were kisses. The X’s remind me of crossed arms, and the O’s are like a big round mouth coming at you.

“What, are you doing big open mouth kisses? Gross!”

(Guess it depends on who you’re sending the note to, then!)

I guess I never really spent any time wondering if I had the X’s and O’s backwards, but since we’re currently just over 70% for “The O’s stand for hugs and the X’s stand for kisses”, I guess I’m wrong. Now that I think about it, neither X’s nor O’s really remind me much of hugs. But I still stand by the fact that mouths look more like O’s than X’s, even when not doing sloppy open mouth kisses.

Show me an ‘X’ in here

Okay, but forget all of that. I can see that going either way, now that it’s been brought up. However, my smoking gun, so to speak, is the fact that you *always* start with the X’s, and you *always* say, “hugs and kisses”. XXX OOO = “hugs and kisses”. So the X’s translate to the hugs, and the O’s translate to the kisses.

Q.E.D.