Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Stick It In the Faucet or the Hose

Every time we have a long weekend, it’s a little harder for Shef to go back to school the next week. This is the same for me when I’m teaching. It’s like that little extra taste of home makes the daily grind all the more bitter. Since Shef was sick on Friday, he was especially hesitant to join his class yesterday. Thank God he had show-and-tell. In fact, he was in the middle of it when I came to pick him up. “Just a second, Mom,” he said from where he was standing at the head of the group-time mat, holding his phony mustache-nose-and-glasses disguise. “I’ve just taken my first question.”

When I finally got him into the car and asked how the day was, he told me he’d picked some gunk out of his ear.

“You did what?” I asked.

“There was some stuff in my ear, and I picked it out.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Just some gunk,” he explained. “I’ve never picked anything out of my ear before.” This is as opposed to his nose, which is so frequently mined that he has a scab on the outside of his left nostril.

“Hmmm,” I said. This seemed an appropriate response to me, as we were most likely talking about a finger-full of ear wax. But when I looked in the rear-view mirror, there were tears forming in his little eyes. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, I thought you would be really impressed about it,” he said, dejected. I think the ear wax might have been the high point of the day.

1 comment:

Jackie said...

I have an antique bottle with "ear wax" written on it. Do you think that people mined ear wax in the past and stored it in a bottle? Maybe Shef should start collecting ear wax.