Wiggled and Jiggled and Tickled Inside Him

So, this week, yon pseudo stay at home mom aka grammar/spell-check weirdo, has corrected two items from oldest’s report card and homework packet. His teacher is on my spell-check-from-hell-suspect-list. My thesaurus usage is at an all-time high. In other words: I’m keepin’ it simple and stickin’ with one or two syllable words in my notes back to her. So far, I haven’t used one red pen. I am sorely tempted. For now, a nice soporifically blue pen will do.

My partner was cleaning out the office this morning and came across a story that was written by our middle child back in November. Neither of us had ever seen it before and, once we’d interpreted what it really said, we both looked at each other and cracked up.

This child is so macabre; his favorite movie is “Queen of the Damned.” He loves blood and guts and scary stuff. Last night at the dinner table, he said he was going to direct a horror movie starring all of us. I would be cast as the evil suspect (per usual, I am always the bad guy), his mom would be the victim, his older brother would be the policeman (but he’s crooked, don’t you know), and his little brother would be (wait for it, he actually does this and it‘s hilarious)… *air-quotes* “ The Eyewitness.” (There is so much that you could read into this that I’m sure any therapist would have a field day examining each of our psyches, our unusual family dynamics, and our decision to choose a white, foo-foo dog.)

This is brilliant because, you see, youngest is autistic and not very verbal and they would have to “pry it out of him and he would fool them with his gibberish which means it would be an unsolved case and the entire city would shiver in fear.” Okay. He’s really thought about this and we have definitely been watching way too much CSI. We don’t let them watch it but they will walk through the room, stop, watch for a minute, and then we tell them to move on. Clearly, he’s been gleaning the CSI boob-cube.

He was supposed to write a story from a statement given to him by his teacher. I have no idea how this subject came up except that it might have had something to do with eating turkey over Thanksgiving. Whatever the motivation, it was right up his alley. I’m going to give it to you with spelling errors and everything because I’m not his editor.

“Why My Life Should Be Spared.”

Because I’m not tasty. I’m not a rael turkey. I’m a boy. I’m stuffed with nasty stuff. My life sould not be spard because my life is good alive. I need to be stuft with stuff like meat or stufing or birds or skin.

The End.

Of course, when asked, he told us that he’s stuffed with blood and guts and other nasty stuff like a spleen. A spleen? Uh huh and some really long intestines. And acid. And green beans. (And then everything digresses into some kind of pee/poop dialogue and I put up “the hand” and he giggles.)

Well, I don’t see anything in there about “snaps and snails and puppy dog tails.” No, that’s just gross, he tells me. Or spiders. He looks at me and goes, “ooObbBBbbbahhhh! Really? Could a spider be inside my tummy? “ Suddenly, he’s not so Grissom-ish.

Spiders scare him. We had a problem with spiders when we first moved into this house. They resided in the kid’s bathroom and every morning there would be some kind of meltdown over having to take a shower with spiders. I would be sitting on the couch, drinking my coffee, and suddenly an unclothed, crying and shivering little boy would appear in front of me and say, “There’s a sp..sp…spi…. SPIDER….in the bathtub!!”

“Tell your mother.” would be my response.

“She said to tell you.” he’d cry.

What I really want to know is… how come I’m always the bad guy in the stories but always the one to rescue them, in real life, from a hungry, boy-eating Wolf spider? I think I already know that answer to that question.

It’s because I’m the one who corrects their grammar and spelling and checks their homework and relentlessly makes them tell me what their reading story was about versus just checking off that they spent 30 minutes staring at a book. I’m also the one who makes them eat everything on their plates. I always suggest they eat their broccoli with the same gusto they reserve for pepperoni pizza.

This entire directional plot line was played out while we were eating said pepperoni pizza during a celebration of their improved grades on their report cards. We both told them how proud we are of their accomplishments and hard work. Our middle boy went from a D+ in reading (okay, that is so not possible… it HAD TO BE the computerized test and the teacher concurred but said he had to give the grade because of the test results) to a B+. Bravo! I’m not sure his storytelling prowess has grown much but his reading is much, much better. And in every good writer… is a good reader. Even if he is reading every vampire story and “Goosebumps” book he can get his hands on…

Methinks his gusto runneth over in the pepperoni pizza and Poe-ish imagination department. However, I do not edit or question the content of his stories and believe me, he has some real doozies. Who knows? Maybe he’s the next Clive Barker or, dare I say, Edgar Allan Poe? He’s certainly busy collecting the evidence and casting us all in his next production of (wait for it)… *air quotes* “The Scary Minick.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I just made it up.” he says with a sinister smile.