When the Queen is away...

her children will play...

Today we drove back from my parents house in Waldo. We'd been there since Friday, doing our part to house sit while Queen and Slim are away in Alaska. My sisters and families were with us for the fourth of July weekend. After a house full of Alley's for a few days the place was a lot messier than usual, but we all pitched in to clean it and restore it to it's usual level of cleanliness.

The kids have said some funny things I wanted to record...
We were on the dock shooting fireworks and after one went up and shot some yellow sparks up high Jackson bursts into singing the Beatles song: "Lucy in the sky, with diamonds!" and his cousin Adam looked at him and said, "Jackson, you're just plain silly." True, Adam.

Later, my sister Susan entered the bathroom to find two large pieces of poo in the toilet. She figured someone forgot to flush and went ahead and flushed the toilet. Seconds later, in walks Jackson, with his pants at his ankles, holding a baby wipe. He wasn't quite finished with his job. He looked at Susan embarrassed and said, "Did you see anything?" She said, "Yeah! I saw two turds!" Jackson said, "What's a turd?" (Even with all the poop around my house we don't really ever refer to it as turds, I guess.) She explained what it was, and then Jackson said, "Ooo, Love Turds!" (I guess because there were two of them?) I would have sworn on my life that turd was spelled t-e-r-d. The things you learn when you blog.

At dinner one night Jimmy picked up my parent's antique nut grinder. It's a metal contraption with a handle on top of a jar. You put the nuts in the top and turn the handle, they pass through some turning blades, and you get chopped nuts. Jimmy made a man joke something like, "As long as you don't grind my nuts." I gave him the obligatory eye roll for making a pre-pubescent joke and we enjoyed being able to communicate with each other without any of our children knowing what we were talking about. Jackson was rather quiet for a second, then he said, "Are you talking about the nuts in your groin??" And Jimmy said, "There goes one more thing my kids have taken from me." Somehow I'm not sad to say goodbye to jokes about Jimmy's nuts.

My mom has a bathroom with a claw foot tub and old fashioned tile. There are two bathrooms in that end of the house and we refer to them as "the lake bathroom" or "the old fashioned bathroom". Today Libby said, "I thought Dad was in the old passion bathroom but he's not." He may not have been doing his doo in the old passion bathroom, but I'm sure he brought plenty of passion to the job.

Yesterday in the car we played an old song Jimmy made on Garage Band, he named it "Techo Wonderland." But now it's going to have a new title because at the end the bass drops off and gets real distorted, ending in three low bass notes all by themselves. As soon as it was over Cash yells out, "Dad's got gas!" Yes, to a techno beat.

The kids didn't destroy anything to an unfixable state (they did almost overflow the tub without me realizing it, and Cash emptied an entire Sam's sized bag of Craisins onto the kitchen floor) and we left my Dad's dog Walker safe in his royal kennel, (I just kept giving him human food and telling him if he wouldn't run away, there would be more) so I guess we did our job. But I can assure you, if the Queen had been on her throne, there would have been no nutty jokes, no turd talking, and no techno gas. When you let your lowly subjects use your throne, you never know what you're going to get.