Comedy goldmine

So, I'm visiting my family. Faith is running around with a little charm bracelet that she stole off my mother. In addition to a charm with a totally adorable picture of me as a baby, there is a little charm that says, "Engaged, something something 1969".

I look up and ask my dad if they were really engaged in 1969. He answers yes.

"God, you've been sitting on that for 35 years? It's a comedy goldmine! I mean, the jokes practically write themselves!"

"So, after your mother and I were engaged in 69, we..."

"If there's anyone here who knows what it is like to be engaged in 69, it's me and your mother, so..."

My dad is a pretty funny guy, but I think he might be slipping.

Guilty conscience?

I went over to Mandy and Phil's tonight to read bedtime stories. As I'm getting up to leave, I knocked one of Faith''s stuffed animals out of her bed.

FAITH: Uncle Bobb, you knocked Sarafina out of bed!
ME: Oh, I..
FAITH: You bastard!
ME: *flee* *snicker*
MANDY: What did you say? What did you call Uncle Bobb?
FAITH: Uh... a bastard?

So, Mandy yells at Faith. Faith gets, as we call it, a "broken heart" and starts sobbing uncontrollably. Christian notices and starts yelling out of his bedroom.

CHRIS: What did she say?
PHIL: Nothing. Go to sleep.
CHRIS: What did she say?
PHIL: Nothing. Go to sleep.
CHRIS: What did she say?
PHIL: A swear word. Which she probably learned from you.
CHRIS: NoNoNoNo, not me, not me, not me, I swear it wasn't me! I swear!
PHIL: Okay, go to sleep.
ME: Huh. Guilty conscience?

Happy Father's Day

I've had an itch to do some landscaping lately, but don't really have any appropriate projects here to work on. So, I ended up getting my dad some trees for Father''s Day. Here you see "The Orchard": three apple trees and three peach trees.



Down along the pond is a RedBud that my mom picked out. I have some vague plans to help them build some kind of sitting area along the pond; the RedBud is the start to that.

I'm a horrible uncle

Just so my mom isn't the only one with an embarrassing story on here...

While up at my parents' house last week, I used the bathroom in a particularly heinous way and, apparently, forgot to flush. A few minutes later, my sister comes running out screaming, "Oh my god, who pooped in the bathroom and didn't flush? I'm traumatized!"

I confessed, which for some reason made it even more horrifying to her. Just then, Faith walked in the front door. Now, kids are good for two things, as far as I can tell: being really cute and taking the blame for stuff they didn't do. So, I immediately tried to shift the blame.

"Faith, did you go potty in the toilet and forget to flush?"
"No."
"Faith, I think you are telling a fib. Did you forget to flush?"

At this point, she looks up at her mom with a really contrite look on her face, and says in her most pathetic voice, "I'm really sorry, mommy. I didn't mean to."

And then I felt like a big jerk. Err, but not so big of a jerk that I didn't continue blaming her for it.

When "Kids say the darndest things!" attacks... repeatedly

I met my parents after work to go Father's Day shopping, and they brought Faith along. While I'm looking through the gardening section, my mom takes Faith inside to use the restroom. As they are walking back across the parking lot, Faith screams over to me, "Uncle Bobb! Gramma farted!"
"Shhhh!"
"Well, you did."
"It's not nice to talk about it."
"Well, you are the one who did it."

Thankfully, there weren't many people around, and most of them either didn't hear or did a pretty good job of pretending not to hear. One woman got a pretty good chuckle out of it, though.

The best what?

A few weeks ago, the kids and I had a sleepover at my parents' house. I was setting up the tent and Faith was "helping". The tent is a normal looking dome tent, with flexible poles that hold it in shape. Unlike a normal tent though, where the poles are directly attached to the tent and the weather sheet is draped over top, with my tent the poles are actually attached to the weather sheet and the tent structure is suspended inside with several little hooks.

I had gotten the weather sheet setup and was attempting to get the tent snapped inside. This normally a pretty easy process, but the unstaked corners kept moving around and unhooking. Finally, I asked Faith to hold the one corner hook to keep it from slipping out, while I did the other side. It slipped out anyway and she starting trying to put it back in. I started to go over to do it, but she wouldn't let me.

"No," she said. "I''m going to do it myself. Because I'm the best hooker ever."