Last Friday night was pretty awful (though in the grand scheme of things, not really). Pepa was here for a visit so, of course, we were eating out for dinner. We had an errand or two to run first, and it apparently takes an hour from the time we decide we’re leaving home to the actual time we walk out the door (not to mention driving from one end of town to the other because Bryan’s “got an idea”), so it was 7:30 before we got to the restaurant. On a Friday night, too….well, that’s just great.
The wait at Bonefish Grill was 45 minutes. So, we waited in the van to entertain (and contain) the kids with a DVD…and we waited….and we waited. When the excruciatingly long 45 minutes (no, really, you try it with a stinky van with two “I’m-starving-to-death” kids and a 19-month-old who doesn’t understand that stepping off of the front seat necessarily means falling, almost inevitably head first, into the floorboard…go figure), we checked back in with the hostess only to learn that our wait was not over. To make matters worse, she really didn’t offer any time frame as to when we might get a table! So, after all that, we left; giving up on our appetites for steak and settling for Panera instead.
Don’t get me wrong, I like Panera; it’s just not what my stomach was expecting. Neither was the tea. After waiting a good 10 minutes for them to make more sweet tea (and suffering through unsweet tea sweetened with sugar once it’s already cold…you fellow southerners know what I mean, it’s not the same), Bryan (the sweetheart that he is) filled up my cup with the freshly-made good stuff. Uh-uh…no way…dude forgot to put the sugar in; you know, ’cause there’s so many steps in the tea-making process, it’s hard to keep up! Nonetheless, whether it was the hunger or the exhaustion or the actual cooking, the food was delicious. We all scarfed everything down (including Boy Genius eating the rest of my salad and deciding it was so good he had to go compliment the chef–Boy Genius: “Nice work on the salad” (with a thumbs up gesture); guy behind the counter: “Thanks, little man.”)
When we finally arrived home, there was no backtalk from children about going to bed; they were finally full and dog tired. However, the grown-ups still had to assemble the futon we just bought so that Pepa would have somewhere to sleep other than the floor! As Bryan and Pepa began pulling parts and such out of the box, I asked if they wanted my help. Bryan, seeing an open opportunity to make a snide remark about our bunk-bed assembly experience (that’s a different story), chuckled and said, “We got this.”
So I plopped down on the couch, grabbed the laptop and said, “Alright, then, I’m going to play.” Now, as I said in a previous post, I have way too much to do right now, including studying for a bar exam that’s coming up in about two weeks, and really have no business “playing.” C’mon, though, after the night we’d had???
As I searched and surfed and messaged and posted and tagged, occassionally I’d hear an “Uh-oh” or an “Oh, man” or even a few others I won’t repeat in writing coming from the little worker-bees in front of me. The two manly men were making lots of progress, though, when Bryan apparently didn’t hold the stationary portion of the electric screwdriver tight enough and it whirled around and struck him in the eye. Pepa, known the world over for his keen observational skills, said calmly “That’ll leave a mark.” At the dry sound of this, I lost it, laughing so hard I fell over on my side of the couch and felt tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. Just when I was about to regain my composure the image of Ralphie materialized in my head and the echoes of “you’ll put your eye out” sent me back into hysterics. Bryan, on the other hand, was not laughing.
Turns out, he now has a quarter-inch cut and the hinting of a black eye around the outer curve of his right eye. What’s more, he refuses to put any Neosporin or the like and bandage on the cut, instead preferring to wear his badge of honor in pain to induce either sympathy or guilt (or likely both) out of me. He’s even pulled the kids into it, to the point where both The Girl and Boy Genius have asked with such concern, “Mommy, why did you laugh at daddy hurting his eye?” Really all it does is make me want to laugh more. (Wait…no, of course, I’m kidding…).
Nevertheless, despite both Bryan’s and Pepa’s admonitions about my laughing, the two of them can’t help but chuckle everytime we talk about what happened. Pepa’s always quick to point out that he was only laughing at me laughing so hard and not at Bryan’s misfortune. Yeah, right, I ain’t buying it. But, given that saying I’m not very graceful is an understatement and all that I have going on right now and my sorted history with karma, I really shouldn’t be pushing it.
Categories: