My Night

I got off early from work yesterday, at 5:00pm.  Well, it was supposed to be at 5, but it turned out to be 5:15 because I had to take care of a sale I had been working on all day.  I had the order, but it took me over 5 hours to get the order in the system and get the appropriate authorizations to actually write it.

Hey, it’s retail, what can I say?  Everything you heard about it is true.  I actually like the selling part of it, most of the time, like when the customer seems to be interested in what I’m saying and they are not texting or calling their significant other or next door neighbor or their best friend’s dentist or their daughter’s teacher’s cousin who, coincidentally, know more about appliances than I do even though I’ve been doing this for seven years.

In the big picture, the nice people I tend to help more than the “bad” people.  Luckily, there are few “bad” people.  But, one “bad” person can ruin a day.  Feel free to substitute any word – negative, mean, nasty, cheap, smelly, breathing – into my euphemism.  “Bad” people come in all shapes, sizes, religions, genders, races and sexual preferences.  Bottom line, they all suck as customers.  But, I digress.

Nevertheless, on this day, I got off at 5:15 and immediately gunned my car and raced home to take care of the little buggers.  I got home and they were watching TV.  Ok, TV is not inherently a “bad” thing.   I mean, I watch it.  Sergeant Major Mommy (SMM) watches it and woe be to the person who stands between her Zombie Walking Dead TV series or that set in medieval times fantasy adventure sexy show, Bowling for Trolls.

I watched more TV when I was a kid than the little buggers do now and I turned out ok, mostly.

So, I prepare for dinner and prepare the dinner.  We eat dinner.  Well, I eat dinner. Archibald (not his real name) eats part of his dinner while Mortimer (not his real name, either) disregards dinner entirely.  One thing I did do as a kid, and I still do, I eat food.  Now, I don’t like everything like cooked spinach which looks like it came up from the ocean floor via a whale’s regurgitation or blue cheese which came from a sour cow.  I mean how can it not be sour if the cheese is blue?  Was the cow blue too?  At least the farmer who raised it could have played some “happy”  (Yanni? Air Supply? Donna Summer?) music in the barn so the cow would not have spawned blue cheese.  Seems like a no-brainer to me.

About this time, SMM calls and says she is working late so she won’t be home to help me (moi, numero uno, big daddy, Mr. Right) with the homework and maybe not the bath and maybe not the reading to the little buggers before bed time.  It is the best of times, it is the worst of times… But, I digress.

I am on my own.

After what passes for dinner is over, we tackle homework.  I’m not sure in what year schools decided to give homework to second graders that was as hard and as extensive as homework I had in graduate school.  However, Morty does his homework mostly on his own, thank God, and I help Archie who needs some extra help.

Archie was diagnosed with a Learning Disability last year and is receiving special attention in his school.  Thank God for that, too.  But, Archie is a little challenging to get him to sit down and actually do the homework.

Morty goes right to his work and I check on him regularly, but he seems to be doing it with some minor corrections by me, like he makes backward 6s and 9s.

Of course, Archie is a little more challenging and after 15 minutes of chasing him around the house, I catch him.  I threaten to take the straight jacket off grandma and use it on him if he doesn’t sit and do his homework.  But, he just laughs.  Ok, it’s a joke, I would never put a straight jacket on grandma (anymore).

Actually, Archie does a good job once he starts on his reading.  He has come a long way just in the past couple of months with the extra tutoring we secured for him.  And, even though I’m his daddy, he is an incredibly cute kid.  Morty is very cute, too.  It still baffles us as to how these two beings turned out so differently after sharing embryonic bunk beds for nine months.

Archie likes to sit on daddy’s lap.  So, on the couch, he climbs up and is reading a book HE HAS NEVER READ BEFORE and doing an admirable job when, don’t ya know, mommy makes her grand entrance.  It is a very good sign when daddy has the buggers doing homework when SMM walks in.  She’s happy, I’m happy.

How she came to be home earlier than I anticipated is surely a miracle right up there with Lourdes and the Miracle Mets.

The boys finish their homework. They take baths.  Daddy reads to them for nighty-night time and they drift off to boogie slumberland.  I love it when things work out.