Post-posted from Thursday, April 11, 2002, 8:30 pm

I just got finished playing hide & seek with Giselle. She counts up to about16 and then starts to scatter the numbers “twenty-two, twenty-three, a hundredy-eight, nine and three-quarters, TEN!” As I scrunch behind the bathroom door chuckling to myself. It took forever for her to find me that time, and by the time she made it into the bathroom, I jumped out: “BLAAAAAGHHHHH!!!”...oh man did she yell—for like 30 seconds she yelled while staring me straight in the eyes, and then, “Daddy why did you SCARE me like that?? DON’T SCARE me like that! Okay now, you find me and I’m going to hide so good you’ll never find me.” Oh man she is a barrel of laughs.

We took her and Harrison to the doctor on Tuesday. And she’s just soaking up the attention. So after all the check-up stuff, the doctor leaves, and in comes the nurse. She has Amanda hold Giselle in some sort of full-nelson hold-down, and Giselle is just letting it happen—and in goes the first of three shots and happy time is over. It was horrible. We didn’t tell her anything about the shots. We’d never get her in the door. And she was screaming endlessly. So I’m holding her after the shots and telling her I’m sorry, and how I know it hurts, and it’s all over now, and meanwhile, Harrison is getting set up for one booster shot. And he knows what’s coming and he’s struggling and yelling and I whisper to Giselle “Look, Harrison is going to get his shot now,” so she’d know she wasn’t alone. And so he gets his shot and they take him off the table and Giselle says “HEY! How come he only gets ONE shot? I only wanted ONE SHOT! AAAAAAAHHHHH!!! I only wanted ONE SHOT!!! AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!”

It looks like we’ll have to get her eyes checked and she may need glasses. They did an eye test on her that surprised me when she couldn’t see things that I assumed she did. Wow, that was something I hadn’t even thought of. Well, we’ll get her some cool glasses. Not like those thick, square, institution glasses they forced on Amanda and her friends back in Oklahoma.

She was showing me her crayon pictures when I got home today, and describing a picture of a house, and “this is the bed, and this is the living room, and this is the bathroom...” and she moves on to the top floor of the house, “and this is the laundry room, and this...” as she points to all these wavy lines “this is the stink...” and I start cracking up and she gets offended, “well it’s because this is the trash can, and see, it has diapers in it...” I just about wet myself.

I was checking the flowerbed in the front yard today, and after nearly a week, the neighborhood cats haven’t crapped in it yet. I cut up thorny rose canes and layed them all over their favorite stomping grounds. Sure beats paying money for cat repellant that doesn’t work for squat. And it doesn’t look all that bad either. I never thought I’d chase those rotten varmints out of there. I’d just love to see them trying to walk in and scrape open a hole and then run squalling out of the yard after getting stabbed. HA! Take THAT! Of course, I’m going to have a yard full of crispy dead leaves and grass anyway if it doesn’t rain at least once every couple months. It wouldn’t look to good for us to have a lush green yard if the rest of the town is rationing this summer.

Simpering son sits
Like wet sandbag on my lap
Head is bonking too

Jeremy