Wednesday, November 2 2022

Dear Journal,

Good morning, friends. Welcome to Wednesday. I'm here at the family computer in our dining room. There's a cozy morning chill in the air, and after a hot shower the draft feels kind of nice on my skin. Miles is wide awake in his dimly lit bedroom, but we're going to just ignore him for a few more minutes so we can get the old journal entry out. Besides, he's engaged in some kind of spirited debate with the stuffed animals arranged around his crib. We had better not interrupt.

Sip. Rodney hopped off to school just a few minutes ago sporting his burgundy colored pants and yellow shirt in honor of "fall colors day". This outfit was only slightly more difficult than the one we threw together yesterday for pajama day. Yesterday, Rodney literally wore the same pajamas he went to bed with, and to his own smug satisfaction, he just kept them on for bedtime yesterday too.

The morning routine today went as follows - I let the sun into his bedroom at 7:45 AM. He finally sat up at 7:50. For twenty minutes, he picked at some soft, sticky waffles from his seat at the breakfast table, offering Minnie bites when I wasn't looking. He got sidetracked by the computer screensaver, which was randomly grabbing portions of text from my blog's RSS feed. Rodney was watching for "sight words".

"You want me to just read it to you?" I asked. Rodney nodded, and to his delight I read the entry from when we watched fourth of July fireworks in the backyard.

At this point at 8:13 AM, Rodney had only three minutes to watch YouTube videos. Personally, I'd have just stared out the window until it was time to go, but to Rodney any amount of time you can spend on YouTube is worth it.

Rodney is keen on the idea of the family starting a YouTube channel. "We'll call it Rodney's Building Channel," he says. "But first, we need to buy a camera."

I'm happy to be finished with Halloween. The sugar rushes were starting to get old. But on the day of Halloween, we had one final bang to walk around the neighborhood. We started, of course, with the two neighbors we share a cul-de-sac with. Rodney and Miles, sporting their dinosaur costumes, trudged across the lawn to Dave and Pam's house.

Rodney and Pam are good friends. He always makes a point to greet her when he's waiting for his bus. It probably helps that her name is easy for Rodney to remember - Pam Pidgeon. He says it like it's one word - "Pampidgeon". He also thinks pretzels are called "prenzils", but I digress.

We hiked to the other side of the cul-de-sac where are neighbors John and Kathy were sitting on the porch with their dogs. From there, we set out on a longer journey up the street. To cut down on the walking and conserve Miles' energy, we piled into the "candy wagon". Pulling the candy wagon all night was a good enough exercise, and it gave me a stronger case to help myself to their candy later that night.

Miles fell down about twelve times. But only one of those was a faceplant, so all in all it was a successful night.

It's nice to be finished with Halloween. The hectic last minute candy shopping, school events, and spontaneous junk food snacks were starting to wear us down. Marissa picked up a bad head cold. I was starting to feel it to, but I managed to stave it off with a solid power nap. For us, we'll use the next few weeks to quietly regroup - home cooking, keeping up with chores, and watching hockey on the couch at night.

Hope you have a good Wednesday. See you around, Internet friends.