spring break begins

It's official: Dennis is out of school until Tuesday the 22nd (and so am I!). The day we return to school is the day Dennis' school party is scheduled. He has chosen a Batman theme for that party.

We are heavily into party preparations around here. Dennis pulled me aside for a talk a couple of days ago. "Mommy," he said, "I think the rest of the house needs to look as good as my room does." And I agreed with him. But just because he thought I should clean it didn't mean that he appreciated that I was busy and couldn't give him my undivided attention all day. After I finished an Everest of laundry and reorganized the medicine cabinet, I asked him if the bathroom looked better (the bathroom is also our laundry room). He replied "no, you still need to sweep and get the trash out." So I did that, of course, and plenty of other things that needed doing. David fixed the Blazer and burned a room's worth of cardboard boxes that had accumulated, so things are looking up!

Tonight Dennis organized a play table in the living room for his younger party guests (and happily played on it himself). Then the three of us sat at the table and made some art for the party. Dennis and I water-colored some construction truck pictures (while David used his favorite colored pencils), and sometime in the middle of our art session Dennis said "I know--how about if I have a police birthday party?". This was after I'd gotten construction party favors and after he'd set up a construction table and after we'd painted construction pictures. I told him all this and he said "well, all you have to do is paint some police pictures now." I reminded him that we'd already assembled the construction favor bags at his insistence (and who in the world ever came up with the idea of favor bags???) and therefore could not return stuff and could not change the theme. He laughed then, letting me know that he was kidding, just trying to get a reaction out of us. It worked.

A new milestone for today: the telling of (bad) knock-knock jokes. You have been warned. Today's best of the bad lot went like this "knock-knock; who's there?; macaroni; macaroni who?; macaroni and cheese, of course." Oh goody. I remember very clearly when my brother went through this stage, and I still remember his favorite creation, but I'll spare his ministerial dignity by keeping it to myself.