Jay went on a fishing trip last weekend, to celebrate Grandpa Lyons' 70th birthday, so I had the boys all to myself. The first notable thing was that Lani dropped his much loved piggy bank on his foot. It's a large ceramic piggy bank, heavy with coins, and it shattered and left a deep gouge in the top of his big toe. His foot is otherwise fine, and he runs around all day until I take off his shoe to change the dressing, at which point he experiences the trauma of the injury all over again, refuses to put any weight on his foot, or walks with an exaggerated limp. As soon as I put a sock on him he forgets all about it and walks normally.
Then Lani fell off our backyard step and scraped the skin off his nose. This makes it pretty near impossible to wipe his nose, which is constantly running. So he's got a face full of snot and scabs. His appearance got even worse after I cut his hair. His bangs were getting in his eyes so I grabbed the kitchen scissors and snipped them straight across before he could protest. Now he looks like a friar. A friar that got in a bar fight.
Ro saw me cutting Lani's bangs and asked for a hair cut too. So both my kids looks like friars.
Lani also picked up a strange habit over the weekend - he won't leave the house unless he is wearing one winter mitten. It has to be one of the mittens that he wore as a baby, so there are no thumb slots. It's like a straight jacket for your hand, which really pisses Lani off anytime he tries to grab stuff. Still, he refuses to take it off.
Ro has a new nickname for Lani: disgusting. Which he pronounces as "dissusting." He used to reserve it for meal times, when Lani smeared food everywhere, or to generally remark that "babies are dissusting." But now it's more like a term of endearment, he'll say, "come on, dissusting," when he wants Lani to follow him or come and play.
Saturday morning we drove to Kids n Action, an indoor hasidic amusement park, for a birthday party. It's on McDonald, so we drove under the elevated train tracks, with the F train rumbling above us. Kids n Action is huge, and it was all shuttered, which should have been my first clue, but we were early and I figured by the time we found parking and walked there it would be open. It was only a few blocks to walk but it took forever - Lani insisted on walking himself, so Roan held his hand to try and speed him up, tugging his arm and saying, "hurry up dissusting." Every store we passed was shuttered and the streets were deserted. I realized - we were in Borough Park on Shabbos. Nothing was open. I had my dates confused; there couldn't be a birthday party in this neighborhood on a Saturday.
I don't why, but I get this feeling of freedom and joy at times like these, when I've made plans that fall through. It's like I've just found a few spare hours in my pocket that I hadn't counted on. Saturday was beautiful, a crisp and sunny spring day, we were all dressed and well fed with brushed teeth, and we had just been given the gift of nothing to do. The whole day opened up in front of us.
So we climbed the Avenue I station and went joy riding on the F train. The sun streamed through the windows and Lani stood on the bench and Ro sat on his knees, their heads together, watching the tracks and the roofs of houses rush by. The whole thing felt extra sweet because I hadn't had to plan it. All the effort and hassle of getting us out the door was assigned to something else, and this train ride was something extra that fell into our laps.
We did make it to the birthday party on Sunday, and it was lots of fun. But our sunlit ride on the F train stands out as my favorite part of the weekend.
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