How to break my heart

I had to take off from work a little (2 hours!) early this afternoon to get home to pick up Thing 1 to go to his Dad's house so he could root through his bedroom over there to find his tux for the band concert he's playing in tonight so we could get home at a decent hour so I could check back in with work before stopping at 5:30 or so to get ready for a meeting at the TinyHouse tonight.

That's right, by 2:30 in the afternoon I already knew what I was going to be doing at 9 p.m. Mostly involving running around, with a certain dearth of lollygagging and slothfulness. Shameful, really, the lack of laziness.

While en route, Thing 1 was unusually talkative, even for a young man as talkative as he normally is. He filled the transit with tales of what he's done at school, how he's learning commands in Spanish 2, what his grades are, and how he likes being a happy person. Being happy is much better than being an old grump, says he, and he's found out that by just smiling at someone you can almost always make them smile back, which he said was a good thing because...

get ready for this....

and I quote: "well, I'm a pretty funny-looking kid Mom. I'm tall and skinny and have big feet, wear glasses, have a big nose, am paler than Florida sand, and I'm covered in freckles."

*Tink*

*Clink*

SHATTER, there went my heart.

My beautiful boy, my tow-haired toddler turned into a fine young man, thinks he's funny-looking.

He thinks he's funny-looking.

My baby.

*Crack* There goes another piece.

This parenting thing, it doesn't ever get any easier, does it?

---

On a totally different note, and well prior to the above heartwrenching scene (you're wiping a tastefully shed tear from the corner of your eyes, aren't you?) I had to tell some coworkers today the terrible truth about me. It was so very difficult to tell them, but I did come forth with the potentially embarrassing truth that I did not, in fact, have a family of rabid badgers (once again!) living in my cubicle, but instead was experiencing a terrifically pronounced case of borbyrigmi, and for the near future would be bringing them the dulcet tones of the LaBrea Tar Pits. Straight from my alimentary canal.

Don't know what I ate to make it so, but whatever it was was colossally distracting, if not to them, then to me. I'd never heard such cacaphony coming my my gut before, not even on those other 5 occasions I've talked about this very thing on this very blog - nope, today's gastrointestinal concert was the loudest, longest show ever put on - a veritable Wagnerian scope of output by a normally more Bach-like tract.

And I told my cubemates all about it, so, you know, in case they hadn't noticed before they'd certainly be listening for it now.

Maybe that wasn't the best idea, huh?

Tiff out.