Contentment

My niece (Angel Butt) and my little brother (Five Head) are in Minnesota along with my mother and grandmother this week. They're staying in the spare bedroom in our apartment until Saturday, and of course since the kids have been excited to go swimming in our pool for weeks, now the weather is cold and rainy and generally shitty, which means that all 6 of us are cooped up in the apartment watching Disney movies and eating cake.

Did I mention that yesterday was my mother's birthday and today is my grandmother's birthday and Thursday is Angel Butt's belated birthday party? We have an overage of cake.

Every time I see Five Head (the brother who was born when I was 15 and, for years, felt more like my child than my sibling)((the brother who has the world's biggest head))(((literally, not figuratively))), I'm struck by how "adult" he is. He talks like an adult. He behaves like an adult. He's very clearly grown up around a LOT of adults, and that is simultaneously awesome and freaky, because he watches both his local and national evening news because, he says, he finds it "interesting", and he is currently attempting to teach Angel Butt to say "antidisestablishmentarianism" because he thinks all kids should know the biggest words.

In the car with him on Saturday, he very politely asked me if I'd been stung by a bee on my nose. I assured him that it was just my giant rhino bone, the reason I refer to my nose as The Honker, and that it was a family trait passed down from generation to generation on my mother's side. No, he insisted that indeed, it looked as if ATOP the giant bone, there simply had to be some form of bug bite protruding. I finally just told him to touch the damn thing and feel for himself, so he reached his hand forward towards my extended face and felt my nose.

"Huh," he said. "I guess it really IS just the bone." Thanks little brother, for that.

Angel Butt is currently potty training, and doing rather well with it so far as I can tell. She informs us of her need to "potty" and willingly runs into the bathroom, preferring the big toilet to her little potty chair. She happily perches on the over sized seat, hands on either side for balance, and begins pointing to everything in sight, asking, "Wus dat?" until I've completed an inventory of the bathroom no less than 40,000 times. Then she grins and asks me, "Wuh YOOO doin?" and I tell her that I'm waiting for her to go potty. She grins bigger still when the rush of pee pee hits the bowl, and proclaims herself, "all done".

After one such victory in the Kwik Trip bathroom in Ames, Iowa, Angel Butt burst out of the purple bathroom door and proclaimed to the entirety of the gas station patrons, "I DIIIID IT!" They were all very proud, I can assure you, and I find myself wishing that I could be as excited about anything in my life as this child is about taking a piss.

I'm at work this morning, and so my family is left to fend for themselves for the day. When I arrived here and pulled my cell phone from my purse, I found it coated in a dried film of saliva and snot (two molars have made an appearance on the top half of Angel Butt's jaw), and I realized that dried saliva on my cell phone is exactly what has been missing from my life.