Here's a word to the wise: It can't be a good idea to cover your body with a sofa cushion and let your hyperactive monkeyboys jump on you for half an hour straight. I can't be sure because I'm not in the vanguard when it comes to internal anatomy, but my spleen feels like it's been smashed flat as a spleencake.
It started out simply and innocently enough. The boys were using the cushions to build a "stronghold," which is one of the hot-button words that dominate his vocabulary. (So far, we've been mercifully spared a barrage of "sphincters" and "rectums," although I'm told they're usually in the second-grade lexicon.) And if Robert says it, then TwoBert has to say it, too. This often places TwoBert in the awkward position of speaking authoritatively of things he knows absolutely nothing about:
T: Daddy! We built a stronghold and now we're going to live in the stronghold!
Me: What's a stronghold?
T: [pauses, then points] That thing!
I was to be the marauder whose marauding advances were to be thwarted by this loose jumble of pliant rectangular prisms. And soon after I had begun marauding, one of largest ones fell on top of me, forming a bridge between the two couches. So I evolved into the Troll Under the Bridge, who would let you pass only if you could answer his riddle:
Q: "What has four wheels and flies?"
A: "Lightning McQueen!" (The judges gave it to him.)
From there, is was a matter of time before I became their personal Dad-oline (tramp0dad?), and with each successive jump I felt closer to either 1) God or 2) a gurney.
We'll take a break from the dadmashing this weekend, because the wonder-couch is still on order. Instead, we plan to hit the sledslopes, which at last look were solid ice. Add the dusting of snow we got this afternoon, and you've got the makings of some real hurtling. With the emphasis on "hurt."
