A Month for Lightheartedness

April begins with a day devoted to pranks and continues on with more daylight, more green things popping up, more birds twittering and hopping and generally looking cute and comical. The dreariness of post-Christmas winter is over. Warmer, brighter times are here. I look out my window and see daffodils, one of the funniest, cheeriest flowers I know.

So I'm devoting any April blog posts to funniness.
Let's kick it off with some favorite family stories.

Swallowing Sally.
One day, when Sally was barely old enough to put together a sentence, I took a driving detour past our old house. It was the first house Husband and I owned. It's where we started out as idealistic pre-parents and then had our bubble burst when our finicky, colicky, wonderful Huckle arrived. I was three months pregnant with Sally when we moved three miles away to our current house.

I stopped the car at the curb of the quiet street. The house looked different to me, thanks to the much-needed landscaping the current owners had completed. There was no reason to expect the house to look familiar to Huckle. He was a few months shy of two years old when we left.

"I remember it!" Huckle announced excitedly.

"You do??"

He did. But it wasn't the house he remembered. He remembered the lawnmower shed peeking out from behind the house. I shouldn't have been surprised -- Huckle's first word was "lawnmower."

Sally listened closely as Huckle recounted our daily trips to the shed. Nothing delighted him more than sitting on the riding mower and pretending to drive. He also remembered how he and I would sneak to the shed as quietly as possible in order to spy on the family of mice that lived there. Animal-loving Sally listened with envy. She would have loved to swing that shed door open and watch the mice scurry away!

"Where was I?" demanded Sally from her car seat behind me.

"You were in my tummy," I told her.

Silence from the backseat.

Then Sally piped up in an indignant voice, "You mean you ATE me??"


Wise Words.
Huckle told me this story last fall. As soon as he entered the house after school, I could see he wanted to confess something. He had that guilty look...

The school principal had led the sixth grade class in a discussion of literature that day. Her topic turned to how life just isn't fair.

Huckle raised his hand. "My mom says that ALL the time," he announced.

(As he described this, I smiled approvingly. Kudos to me! Not only do I have the affirmation of knowing I say the same things as our school's wise principal, but now she has heard tell of the pearls of wisdom dripping from my lips.)

Later in the class discussion, another illustration of life's unfairness was brought to the class's attention.

The principal turned to Huckle. "Remind the class what your mother always says."

Huckle gave the class a comic frown and said in a prissy, bossy voice, "Do your homework! Clean your room! Practice your guitar!"

(I died of shame. And then laughed. It really IS funny.)