Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Eli 10.9

Eli 10.9 is getting older quickly. So are his friends.

"Are you kidding me?" he said recently. "Kids are saying new dirty words EVERY DAY now. I'm like, 'What does THAT mean?' "

I remember those days, saying "damn" at the Tetherball pole during recess and being threatened with teacher notification.

On Mother's Day, we went out to a reasonably fancy restaurant with Gloria and my Mom, and at some point while waiting for our food, both Eli and I had our elbows on the table. This led to an etiquette discussion, where I posited that the prohibition was probably due to something obscure two centuries ago (as it turns out, I was close), and that my elbows were staying on the table. "Yeah!" Eli said. "We're elbow brothers, Dad."

"No," I said. "We're El-bros."

"ELBROS!" he said, laughing so hard he fell sideways in the booth. We now have a secret Elbros handshake, which naturally involves elbows.

During his Field Day at school last week, his P.E. teacher was talking to the kids in the gym about the day, mentioned that they would have snacks and drinks at one point, and that they shouldn't drink too much Gatorade or they might get sick to their stomachs. It was a good idea to warn them, since you don't want a bunch of kids barfing in the gym.

"You realize that at the same age boys begin sex education and learn about vaginas, they still need to be told how to snack?" Gloria asked, laughing.

Today, I took Eli to Dave & Buster's after a physical therapy appointment(more on that tomorrow). We decided to eat at the on-site restaurant, and when the waiter brought the check, Eli waved me aside and said, "I've got this." He picked up the check, looked at it, then said, "Ups, no I don't."

By the way, I ordered a salad called The Lawnmower. Here's what it looked like:

That's unfortunately not what it looked like in the menu picture, which showed perfectly precise rows of ingredients. Since I'm sure there is some never-diagnosed shit going on in my brain, something about the perfect rows of food appealed to me in semi-mystical ways. What I received, though, was a positively medieval mess in comparison. But if anyone ever opens up a Lawnmower Restaurant, I will eat there every day.

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