Day: July 5, 2005

My backyard neighbors own a small pink car which a toddler can ride on and push with foot power. This is Patches favorite backyard activity. He’ll sit on that car and push it around their patio for hours vigorously defending it against any incursions from their one-year-old toddler.

This evening bedtime loomed near and I advanced on Patches to begin the exhausting process of removing Small Boy from Beloved Car. As I walked toward Patches I noticed some odd-looking spots on the pavement. Lots of odd-looking spots. I leaned closer to figure out what they were, because on first glance my brain was telling me they were blood. I dismissed this impression as the influence of watching too much CSI and because there were so many of them. If a child had done that much bleeding, there would surely have been screaming as well. A closer look revealed that they weren’t so much spots as smears. I tried to picture kids throwing berries to make smears like these, but there were no available berries. Then I realized that the smears were in a pattern. They followed exactly the same around-the-picnic-table path that Patches uses for driving the pink car.

In my head I flashed back to several days ago when Patches had a mysteriously bloody toe which I only discovered because he’d tracked blood through the kitchen. I turned to look at Patches and sure enough, both of his big toes had been scraped bloody. The quantity of smears sugguested that the toes had been bleeding for the past 20 minutes or more. I picked up Patches and began carrying him home. The moment he noticed the state of his toes he imediately began crying in fear: “I bweeding!” This distress cry quickly drew the interested attention of Gleek who always finds blood fascinating and frightening. The actual scrapes were quite small. Only by continual abrasion was Patches able to spread his blood so far. After bandaging the toes and tucking the boy into bed, I wandered back to my neighbors to advise them what the splotches on their patio were and to help wash them off before the splotches became sun-bakedly permanent.

Watching CSI has definitely changed the way I think about some things. Even though the patio came relatively clean, I can now picture a CSI team with their special lights out there finding all that blood and spinning theories about spatter, and smear, and directions of dropplets. As for me, I feel oddly pleased with myself for sorting out this little evidentiary puzzle. Mommy: Child Scene Investigator.

Like so many other things in our life this past year, our 4th of July traditions are in flux. Last year we finally ditched a 10 year long tradition of huge picnic and watching overhead fireworks because it simply wasn’t working for our family anymore. Last year’s celebration was kind of small, so this year I wanted to make sure that the kids got to do something memorable. I took them to the local parade.

Most of the impetus for the Parade attendance came from Kiki. She really wanted to go. Howard really didn’t. He hates parades. Kiki agreed to help me watch the littler kids and so I packed them all into the car and we trundled off to the parade. The Provo Freedom Festival Parade is a fairly large one I think. This year it had over 100 entries. This means that it is extremely crowded. We had to park about 6 blocks away and walk in. We found ourselves a little spot that had been left bare because it was concrete instead of grass. For us this turned out to be a good thing because when Patches got a little bored he had a place to drive the toy cars I brought for him. I think we were also fortunate in our choice of neighbors. The three groups surrounding us were all extremely tolerant of my kids. The young couple next to us were particularly entertained by their antics.

The group in front of us not only allowed my kids to have space on the curb, but they also fed my kids from their copious supply of donuts. Gleek was the first one to score a donut. She did it by walking up, looking cute and asking for one. I couldn’t have her return it because she’d already taken bites, but I did require her to share with Patches, Link, and Kiki. She shared and then she showed them where she’d gotten it. The grandparently people noticed the longing looks and started handing out donuts like water. I tried to appologize, but the assured me that they couldn’t think of a better use for unwanted donuts. I’m really not sure how many donuts my kids consumed, but every so often Gleek or Patches would wander up with a half-eaten donut and hand it to me. Then a few minutes later I’d see them with a fresh donut. When I packed up to leave I found that I’d collected 6 half-eaten donuts. Add to that the licorice whip that Patches acquired from somewhere and the powerade I bought to keep kids hydrated and the dirt from the street and grass: they were all sticky and dirty in layers before the parade was over.

Kiki and Gleek loved every minute of the parade. They watched every entry, waved at every person who waved, and cheered for all they were worth. They loved the huge floats with beautiful girls in them. They loved seeing the huge balloons carefully limboed under the street banner. The loved seeing all the horses, and bands, and dancing. Gleek especially loved the entries with music. She began dancing around anytime there was music nearby. I’ve got some adorable video of her doing a little jig-like dance to marching bagpipers. The longer the parade went on, the more energetic Gleek became. All the sugar might have been a causative effect there. Link got tired and bored after awhile. He doesn’t like loud noises much and the parade kept being very loud. He was hot and sweaty and kept trying to crawl into my lap. Since I was hot and sweaty too, this wasn’t comfortable. Besides Link is 7 and not really lap-sized anymore. Fortunately getting his hair all wet helped and he perked right up when he was given a donut. Patches loved all the machines. There were cars and tractors and no less than three fly-overs by military aircraft. Hours after we came home Patches expressed an interest in going back to the parade to see more cars. That was the consensus from all the kids. They loved the parade and want to go back again. Even Link said he liked it even though he got hot and occasionally bored.

Predictably, the rest of the day the kids were really cranky and hard to manage. Then in the evening we went out into our cul de sac and lit off a dazzling array of fireworks. It was subsidized by one neighbor who’d spent pantloads of money on huge boxes of fireworks. His teenage son, another neighbor’s teenage daughter, and Howard were the firelighters. The rest of us all got to sit on my neighbor’s lawn and watch the show. The show was made even more impressive by illegal fireworks shot into the sky from a street or two over. I loved getting to sit with my neighbors and visit. The kids loved getting to run around in the dark and see all the fireworks. Howard enjoyed lighting off the fireworks. It was a happy hour or two. Then we herded the children inside and tumbled them all into bed.

Today is going to be a deliberately calm day. We had enough excitement yesterday to last for a week.