Delicate bones and thick skulls

Well, in spite of the brain fog induced in me by my husband’s being on narcotics not being on narcotics, (which I consider the cause of his tossing and turning all night — he says he doesn’t need the drugs, but does he realize I do need the sleep?) where was I*? Oh, yeah, at some effort I’ve managed nonetheless to collect a couple kid stories for you:

Rose calls Dean’s healing foot and crutches his “bone,” and, although we tried to tell her what he had on it was a cast (which he’s now swapped for a special boot since he didn’t tolerate having a cast on well,) she settled on that term, and since it works fairly well, we leave her alone about it now. So, she’ll hop around in one slipper saying, “I have a bone, Mom!” or, yesterday when Dean came home from work, she greeted him with “You’re home, Daddy! With your bone!”

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Here’s my conversation at dinner with Mabel last night:

Me, watching Mabel gouge her baked potato awkwardly with fork and knife akimbo, clutched in her fists: “Mabel, let me show you the right way to hold your fork.”

Mabel: “You can show me when I’m older. I don’t need to know yet.”

Me: “Eight is old enough to know how to hold a fork.”

Mabel: “It hurts to hold it that way!”

Me: “It hurts my eyes to watch you use it the way you are.”

Mabel: “No, it doesn’t.”

Me: “Yes, it does.”

Mabel: “Just looking at something can’t hurt your eyes.”

Me: “You can’t know what does and doesn’t hurt my eyes. And this does hurt my eyes. Okay, so you put your fork in your hand this way –”

Mabel: “Isaac can be your golden boy! I’m not going to be your golden girl!”

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(She did finally relent, sort of, when I told her I wouldn’t let her eat dinner at friends’ houses any more if she wouldn’t let me teach her how to hold her fork.)

P.S. In spite of Mabel’s insinuation, Isaac is hardly the world’s great example of how to hold a fork — let alone of how to care that you’re walking around with ketchup all over your face all day.

*To be a bit fair, Dean says that it’s not pain at his surgery site keeping him awake, but that his dressings and the boot he has to wear to protect his foot seem to cut off his circulation quite easily, so it’s the numbness that bothers and worries him. The other night at 3:30 AM he decided he needed to loosen his bandage, and I really didn’t think he should do it himself and strenuously objected (also not restful,) but he did. So I made him call the doctor the next day, to make sure that had been an okay thing to do — and the doctor did say it was okay, as long as Dean doesn’t fiddle with the gauze underneath the bandage. (There, I managed to clear Dean’s name and also bore you with a lot of detail.)

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