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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Sadly, we had no cannonballing in the hotel pool tonight. Tonight's hotel has an outdoor pool, and we arrived in the middle of a downpour. No, thanks.

So we were left with the task of winding down our children, who had sat really very well in the car all day, without a pool. We used a combination of a hotel bed Wrestling Match, and hotel lobby Game Night. While the pool would have been more effective, we had a lot of fun together.

Have you ever tried to have a silent wrestling match? Our children have no volume control whatsoever. Boo can moderate her voice for a moment, but then it's back to shrieking. Rooster, honestly, appears to have only an on/off switch. That boy lives loud!

At one point, Roo went flying off the bed head first. He jumped up a moment later, yelling, Dad! Did you see that? I landed on my forehead!

I love my four year old boy. Before I had children, four was my favorite age. Now that I have kids, I love different things about every age and stage. But four will always remain my sentimental favorite.

Rooster is not just all boy; he reminds me also of a large breed puppy. His chubby feet are not so much long as they are fat, requiring a shoe size or two larger than a flatter foot would take. Since birth, we have noted his oversize dimpled ham hands, dubbed gorilla mitts by the Captain.

Our boy is also slow. I can't explain the why of that. All I know is that he is always at the end of the line, six steps behind. He is last out of the house, last out of the car, last to finish his dinner, everything. I have taken to calling him King Slow-as-Dirt.

Upon which Boo informs me, But Mom, dirt doesn't move.

Exactly.

At the beginning of our road trip yesterday, I bought the kids each a Beanie Baby Happy Meal toy at McDonalds. You know, cheap thrills and all that. Boo got a panda, Rooster got a Beanie of Grimace. What Ever.

But Roo doesn't know anything about Grimace. He looked at that purple toy and started talking about his Blueberry. No, that's not it's name. He thinks it is a Blueberry. He actually named it Marshmallow. I do not feel the need to correct him.

This morning, before embarking on our day's drive, I took him for a final pit stop in the hotel lobby. I put Boo in the girls' side and him in the boys' side of the drinking fountain. For the next fifteen minutes (have I mentioned he is slow?), he could be heard inside singing to himself, loudly of course:

Yeah! I'm a man! I'm a man! I get to go in the man bathroom all by myself!

The Captain just filled me in on one more great Rooster moment from today. My Baby Doll was laid out on his car blankie while we stopped at a rest area. As we wrapped up our stop, the Captain started rounding up the kids. Roo promptly picked up a corner of his blanket, and started dragging it, baby and all, toward the car. Caveman style.