Moving

Getting more and more excited...it's only a matter of hours before the crew gets here! This may be my last blog for a few days because I will be too busy having fun (or at least eating a lot of food)!

Dave and Luke and I spent the morning focused not on our visitors but on our upcoming move. We took a tour (the first time for me and Luke) of our house-to-be. And you know what? It's a real "rental" - nothing fancy inside - but I can see how it might work. The woman who lives there now gave us the lowdown on the house, the neighborhood, the school...and she was so enthusiastic you'd think she was paid to talk it up. The neighborhood looks like it's really nice and being able to walk everywhere is a real plus. Anyway, we have to figure out how and when we're going to tell Luke about the move, and since he's so interested in building houses we told him it was a house that Daddy was building for us (technically not a lie if you look at it in the figurative sense). Luke seemed neutral on the house itself, but beyond excited about the "pool" (technically a hot tub). When we left he was adamant about wanting to go swimming and I said of course we could swim...but he was mad to learn that I was thinking about the public pool while he was thinking about the hot tub. "I want to swim at the house that Daddy built!" he cried. Give it time, I told him. You'll have lots of chances to swim there again and again.

Not much to say about the subsequent trip to the public pool, except for one crazy incident with a mom of twins who are about the same age as Luke. She was trying to manage them in the locker room, and one was running around without a diaper on and peeing indiscriminately. Potty training a boy is the worst, she told me. "It's the 'power of the sword,'" she said. "He'll just go anywhere. I just feel bad for the dogs at home - they're the ones who are taking the brunt of it."

I think about that and I say, "Hmmmm..."

We're not really potty training right now, but we are trying hard to get Luke to be at least marginally polite. For some reason, there is literally nothing that helps him remember to ask nicely for things. So we could spend days talking about the word please, and then in the middle of dinner he'll come out with, "MORE HOT DOGS! I WANT MORE HOT DOGS!" So last night when he was yelling for banana bread I coached him on a nicer way to say it. Then this morning when he woke up, I heard some odd rustling before his usual call of "Mom-MEEEE!" I went in the room to find that he had turned off the noise machine, opened up the shutters, and walked toward the door. When he saw me, he said, "Excuse me, Mommy, may I please have some banana bread?"

One last word that I've been meaning to mention, and that word is "poopdeck." It's in the first line of one of Luke's favorite Dan Zanes songs, and from the very first time he heard it, he decided that it was one of the greatest words he's ever heard. Unfortunately, he uses it all the time (sing to the tune of the alphabet song: "A, B, C, D, poopdeck G") and apparently he's spreading it around at school, to the point where one of the teachers asked us if we happen to frequent a local bar called the Poopdeck. How embarrassing; we're now the Poopdeck family. I guess things could be worse.