I'm sitting at my mom's computer right now, with G on my lap nursing. It's past the boys' bedtime but our house is too hot to sleep in. Our air-conditioning was working fine when we got home from church this morning, but by the time we got back from a 7-year-old friend's birthday party, it was 90 degrees in the house.
We ended up going out to dinner with my mom, just to be somewhere cool. F hadn't had a nap before the party, so he conked out on the way there, and slept with his head on Scott's lap in the restaurant.
After we ate, Scott took the boys home and my mom and I stopped to get a present for a baby shower we're going to on Saturday. The store was closing and we were standing in the check-out line with baby clothes when I thought to see what videos they had. When I got back in line, Scott called on my mom's cell; F was crying, wanting me to be home, wouldn't eat the dinner Scott packed home with them. Scott put him on the phone, hoping I could cheer him up, but hearing my voice just made things worse. Of course I forgot to mention the video I was bringing home until we were back in the car, and called him back.
Scott relayed the news. "It's a Kipper the Dog video! ... It has a dinosaur in it! ... And a robot! ... And you get to keep it -- we don't have to take it back to the video store."
That cheered him, at least for a few minutes. "Isn't it funny how having kids throws all notions of anti-materialism out the window?" I said to my mom. When we were first married we didn't even have a television. Didn't want one. We were given a used console tv, but we didn't buy an antenna and covered the monstrous thing with a tablecloth. I always thought, we won't spoil our kids with too many things. And really, we don't buy much. But they're given a ton. We don't complain.
When we got home I picked up the boys and took the video to my mom's house. Scott and his A/C expert friend climbed onto the roof. Our house was a couple degrees hotter inside than the air outside at this point. Within minutes, my previously red-eyed firstborn was giggling and hiding from the purple park monster along with Kipper the Dog and his friend Tiger.
Ah, Scott's back. The A/C's running again, so hopefully we'll be able to sleep tonight. Praise God for material blessings, especially restaurants, kids' videos and air-conditioning.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
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The blazing Arizona monsoon heat can't be beat by evaporative cooling. That much is certain! So I revel in the musings of my sister and nephews while enjoying the material therapy of ginger-lemon soy ice cream. And I wonder: does my sister ever dream in cartoon? Are kid-video-watching moms more likely to dream of talking animals than their soap-opera counterparts? I remember, as a kid, loving the books that laid out elaborate landscapes and detailed action sequences. Richard Scary had it down: gorilla getaways, cop chasing banana thief, local baker baking, wormy guy with a hat...and on and on, all on the same page. And that's exactly how I dream now. Detailed landscapes and plot twists, lots of characters and color and sometimes even cartoon! In fact, that wormy guy has figured in a dream or two recently and Pee-Wee Herman even showed up as a sort of political villain. So do I dream like that because my mom had Richard Scary around or was I drawn to those books because they were akin to my interior landscape? Then I might wonder, if my nephew is drawn to non-fiction books of dinosaurs, can I assume he likely dreams in sci-fi? Hmm...I doubt he dream journals.
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