Chopping Ice Burgs
2019–I ran across these boy quotes from 2019 on my desk.
Epona the Camp Intern–“Admitting that you’re annoying is a sign of maturity.
Sweet Boy#1–“I’m proclaiming it! Admitting would mean I’m sorry.”
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Sweet Boy#2–Has started listening to music from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Now his brothers are arguing … because his “old music” is too loud!
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Sweet Boy#3–“Don’t touch my toe. It’s hurt.”
Epona the Camp Intern–“I would never touch your toe, hurt or not.”
Sweet Boy#3–“Would you touch Jesus’ toe?”
Epona–“Only if He told me I needed to.”
Sweet Boy#3–“What if touching Jesus’ toe gave you wings?”
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Sweet Boy#2–Sneaks off with my bag of frozen blueberries–“I rely solely on blueberries for my energy.”
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Sweet Boy#2–Is hoping for extra screen time–“Whoa, Mom. It’s almost your bedtime. You should leave me unattended next to my computer!” Then he looks horrified as I write down what he says.
Momma–“If you don’t want it to be a Boy Quote, you should stop being so funny.”
Sweet Boy#2–“I can’t help it. Humor just flows from me like words flow in one ear and out the other!”
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Friends of Sweet Boy#2 visit. One of the boys (Sweet Boy#2?) discovers a small, plastic hippo (the phone hippo) which has a suction cup on it’s head so that one can use it to prop up a phone. They stick the suction cup to their foreheads. It leaves behind a very clear hickey. I say something like: “Oh, no! Don’t do that, it’s leaving marks all over your face.” A wrestling match ensues because each of them desperately wants the phone hippo so that they can stick it to their face and horrify their mother with charming circular bruises. By the time the phone hippo is confiscated, the three fourteen-year-olds are polka dotted with bright suction cup marks! The friends ask me to photograph their faces, just in case the marks fade before their mom has a chance to be properly appalled.
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Sweet Boy#3–“Constrain your homicidal tendencies!” I have no remembrance of what was occurring when he shouted this. I’ll leave it up to your imagination.
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Sweet Boy#2–Takes one of Princess Leia Freyja’s rawhide bones and chews on it like a dog.
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I exhibit my total lack of knowledge concerning sledding down the driveway, two people per sled, and all of the rules that go along with this activity.
Momma–“Judah got hurt because they were wrestling and sledding.”
Sweet Boy#1–“No, I got hurt because he jumped off of his sled and tackled me. Everyone knows the second person does the wrestling and the first person steers.”
Hmmm … I see.
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Sweet Boy#2–“You oxymoron.”
Sweet Boy#1–Kicking his brother–“I don’t have complete control over my phalanges!”
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Sweet Boy#2–“I lost cogs and wheels and all my marbles!”
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I find out that our middle son started a small business back when he was in grade school, delivering love letters and other correspondence to those unable to talk with girls!
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Momma–“Do you want the light on?”
Sweet Boy#2–“No! I”m a creature of darkness.”
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Sweet Boy#2–He has to write an ode to something in school.–“Guess what my ode is to? It’s something I shout all the time.”
Momma–“Corn maze.”
Sweet Boy#3–“The Unstoppable Egyptian Mold.”
Sweet Boy#2–“No. Bacon!”
Sweet Boy#2–“I’m a very quotable person.”
He is, indeed.
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Sweet Boy#3–Replaces my cup of tea with a mug of water he got out of a puddle in the road.
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Princess Leia Freyja–gets a dum dum sucker stuck in her tail. She just might have been stealing them from the boys’ stash.
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Sweet Boy#2–I have no context for this quote … but here it is–“I stole it using my wits and my left pinkie toe!”
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Sweet Boy#2–Holds up his badly cut finger–“I’m 1/4th of a Griffith!” –My maiden name is Griffith and there is no denying that most of the men in my family are missing the tips off their fingers due to saw/sander related accidents.
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Sweet Boy#2–When I try to hug him, he brandishes a chair like a lion tamer. “You know who’s a great hugger … this chair!” Yeah, maybe when he’s 40 he’ll start hugging his mom again.
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Sweet Boy#3–Cuts his hand. As he retreats to the bathroom to get a Band-Aid, he gets a great idea for scaring his mom. Later, I walk into the bathroom and behold a terrible sight. Bloody hand prints, all over the bathroom mirror!
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Princess Leia Freyja–Gallops toward Scruffy, but trips and slides about ten feet across the meadow on her face in the mud. She is embarrassed.
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The pond is still frozen over but the boys use hatchets and machetes to chop out ice burgs for themselves in the shallows that they then use to “surf” on. Yes, these chunks of free-floating ice are both very slippery and tippy and apparently are also very fun. My thoughts were that they were very cold, but what do mothers know?
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Momma–The pond is at the stage where there is a large chunk of thick ice floating in the middle and the edges are melted … except in the early morning when there is a thin sheet of ice along the shore. I foolishly ask my sixteen-year-old what he was doing down at the pond so early in the morning.
Sweet Boy#1–“The cousins and I had a competition running across the ice to see who would break it and fall through first!”
Before I had the chance to freak out too much, Scruffy pointed out that the part of the pond they were falling into wasn’t over their heads. Still, it is not a sentence that a mother especially wants to hear from her son.
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Sweet Boy#3–Shouts
Sweet Boy#1–Cringes at the sound–“It’s fine to yell if your voice is lower. Wait a couple of years before you talk loudly!”
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Sweet Boy#3–Goes down to the pond to chop holes in the ice with his brothers. He is chopping with a maul, as he hacks away, this important tool drops into the murky water disappearing forever. A few minutes later, he accidentally drops his glasses down the newly chopped hole.
He gets his back-up glasses and returns to the pond the next day. Now the edges of the pond are melted and so he wades and splashes a bit in the shallows … losing his second pair in the murky water.
Sigh, I think we are single-handedly keeping the glasses manufacturers in business.
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Momma–I finally find my timer, stuffed in a weird place on top of the fridge–“No one would put my timer on top of the fridge where I can’t even see it, would they?” I look over at my husband, the tallest person in our house, who just might stash something there.
Scruffy–“Someone would, but I don’t know who they are … or how handsome they might be!”
