Cheese Monster

            I joined a book club. It was started by my favourite duo from the podcast Stories We’d Tell in Bars. I was sucked in by the allure of more hilarity from these two beautiful women (Jen Lancaster and Gina B.) and the hope that I would get knocked out of my Songs of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones to the uninitiated) loop. I’ve read that series three times and am patiently waiting for George R. R. Martin to finish this epic saga.

            I was waiting on the books I put on hold at the library and found a recommendation that everyone seemed to be ranting about called Lie to Me by J.T. Ellison. It’s a thriller. It’s not bad. It took several weeks to get. I put off reading it religiously. It’s due tomorrow.

            The library sent me the reminder e-mail yesterday and I checked how many pages I had left to read. In short, half the book. I attempted to renew it. There is a massive line of people behind me waiting patiently. No dice on the renewal. So, there were two options left. Do as Elsa said and let it go. Or read the shit out of that book. I opted for option two.

            Where does the cheese come into this story? Well, I admit that by making my choice I went rogue on parenting. Again.

            The child was happy as a clam with too much screen time, as I read my book. But, as always happens with reading, a nap soon followed.

            “Mama, I’m hungry,” she said as she poked at my corpse like body.

            “Go find something to eat and don’t make a mess.” Clearly, I was mostly asleep and happy to remain that way. She scampered off to forage in the kitchen. I may have added something along the lines of have an apple, since there is no drama involved in her obtaining one off the counter.

            A few minutes later I heard banging around and the scraping of an unfamiliar object on another unfamiliar object in the kitchen. I assumed she had grabbed the stool out of the bathroom to make the arduous climb to her gummy worms. This strange sound made me wake up, but was not alarming enough to get out of bed to investigate. I went back to reading.

            About two chapters later (they’re short) she came upstairs and climbed back on the bed.

            “What did you eat?”

            “Cheese,” she replied as she stretched out taking up as much of the king size bed as her tiny tot body would allow (most of it).

            “Did you cut it?” I didn’t recall drawers being opened.

            “No.”

            “How did you eat the cheese,” she now had my full undivided attention.

            “I bit it.”

            “What now?”

            “I bit it.”

            “You just took the cheese out of the fridge and just went to town on it?”

            “Noooo.” She was beginning to think she was in trouble with my line of questioning. The lies began to flow. But how could I punish her for my dereliction of duty?

            “You’re not in trouble,” I said as I got out of bed to go to investigate. “You actually bit the cheese?”

            “Yep.” Now the pride was starting to shine through on her face.

            I went downstairs. On the counter was the generic zippy bag which had contained half of a large block of Cracker Barrel Old Cheddar cheese. Or Old Nippy (said with a boisterous old prospector voice) as it’s known in our house. The cheese was pushed out of the dog’s tongue destruction field radius. I was happy with that. I picked up the cheese and wrapper. The wrapper was soggy. The cheese had been mauled. She consumed an alarming chunk of what was left.

            My eyes drifted to the shelf with the laxative of days gone by. I briefly considered mixing up some “special juice” right then and there. I restrained myself. Instead, I laughed. Then I took a picture and sent it to Wade. Then I threw out the wrapper and amputated the well enjoyed remains of the cheese.

            She had the grace to wait twenty-four hours to request cheese again after finishing off the amputated leavings.

            When I asked her what she wanted to eat for dinner after the cheese incident, she requested carrots and cucumber. This rendered the laxative moot. So far.

            To add to this, today, I pulled the butter out to make her some lunch and it looked extremely chewed.

            “Did you eat the butter?”

            “Maybe Ringo ate it.”

            “Are you sure you didn’t eat it yesterday with the cheese?”

            “I didn’t eat it.”

            “Promise?” The pinkie was out. It’s the great deflater of lies. She stepped forward with confidence and curled her little pinkie around mine.

            “Promise.”

            I sent a text photo to Wade.

            He did it.

            Instead of grabbing a knife and being civilized, he got in touch with is inner caveman and tore off chunks of butter.

            You think you know someone.

            One minute they’re navigating life predictably, the next they’re manhandling butter in a way that looks like child bite marks. All in the interest of food lubrication.

           

Uninvited Guest

            Full disclosure: I was not at home when the following occurred. This is a second-hand account of the events of one warm Wednesday evening. Like a dentist extracting a stubborn wisdom tooth, I patiently pulled the details out of Wade. The details of which lingered like a gossamer blanket over the entirety of my house for a few days.

            The dog was put out for his nightly ritual of pooping and sniffing. But on this night his usual routine was interrupted by something. Something which caused him to not just bark, but to rear up on his hindquarters and bay at the intruder. Wade was upstairs preparing a bath for the child, presumably to make her mellow out so she would go to sleep quickly. Curious by the ferocity of our beagle’s cries, he proceeded to the closed guest room window.

            What he saw was the dog fixated on the three bins for recycling, compost and garbage (blue, green and black in colour and in that order, left to right). The dog would pace a few metres to the left but would quickly return to the spot between the garbage bins. Then he saw what the dog was losing his marbles over. A skunk.

            Being the intrepid scientist that he is, he began to record the account on his phone. Sadly, the focus on the video was the window itself and the video quality was akin to being at the optometrist with all of the lenses on the fancy chair in place. Blurry A. F. He sent it to me. I watched it, confused as to what I was looking for. Then I saw it. What looked like a saucy weasel sashaying between the blue and green bins.

            From text:

            Me: WTF?

                    It’s blurry

                    Weasel?

            Wade: Skunk

            Me: Fuuuuuuuuck

                     Did he get sprayed?

Then he gave me the cliffs notes of how he, single handed, removed the scourge of the nose from our yard. I got the Steve Harvey version when I got home.

            After watching the dog freak out at the skunk for a little while, Wade decided that it wasn’t a welcome addition to the fauna of our back yard. The neighbours can have it, but we don’t want that shit in our backyard. Huh, kind of like some people and a safe injection sites. I digress.

            He went outside, through the wide open back door, where the skunk was. Puzzling out what to do, he grabbed the rake. He noted that the skunk continued to spray its ass concoction intermittently. His bright idea was to open the back gate with the rake, allowing the skunk to scurry the fuck out of there. The rake is a standard yellow wide leaf raking contraption. The tines are plastic and, well, rather weak and flimsy. His attempts to jimmy the lock with one of the tines were unsuccessful. And causing more distress in his new stinky BFF. As a result, more stink.

            Being the good Canadian that he is, he went back into the house and retrieved his trusty hockey stick. What he found out later was that there was a gap under the fence which is probably how the critter gained access. We assumed we have the Fort Knox of backyards. So naïve. A second thought crossed his mind and he opted to grab the hose to actively avoid hand to ass combat. He deployed a steady stream to the skunk. Skunks don’t like water. It booked it out of the yard through the hole it had dug. The gate and bins were left covered in skunk stench.

            Relieved of the skunk, he went back to his fatherly duties.

            Then I came home. It was raining a little. I got out of the car expecting stink. My nose was met with the beautiful smell of freshly fallen rain. I opened the garage door. A faint skunk smell lingered. I was hoping that would be it but knew better. I opened the garage door on what I would imagine the inside of the scent glands on a skunk would be like. It grew worse the further into my house I went. It went from “oh yes, a skunk has been unhappy here,” to “a skunk’s ass has been lit on fire in here.” In the middle of the scent that you could cut with a knife sat my brave husband. Freshly showered, in clean pajamas and eating frozen pineapple. Both fans and the TV were on full blast.

            “So, tell me how you got it out of the yard,” I said as I leaned down to give my dog a sniff. He was unscathed through the entire incident.

           

I Only Wanted to Be a Mountain Goat

            We went to the zoo on Thursday. I had thought about going on Wednesday, but a combination of my nap running a bit long and severe weather kept us home. One pinkie-promise later, we were up early and out the door. The one caveat was that we had to be home for an appointment at one o’clock.

            The other caveat was that this was a trip to the zoo to pad out my Workweek Hustle stats. It was mostly business with the occasional stop to look at the animals and then keep moving. There were a few protests, but for the most part, our zoo adventure was uneventful. Until the tigers.

            We rounded the corner in the far end of the Eurasia section, anticipating the striped felines snoozing in their enclosure. What greeted us was what felt like hundreds of people loitering about, listening to a zookeeper explain the nuances of feeding a hungry tiger. At the far end of the enclosure was said hungry tiger and a second lady zookeeper wearing rubber gloves holding a bucket and tongs.

            A volunteer was chosen from the crowd to be the tiger. An eager little boy stepped up to the challenge. The lecturer zookeeper dressed him in a cartoonish tiger skin tunic and he gave a shy roar. Zookeeper guy then explained how they had clicker trained the tigers to accept a food reward. Many clicks were made and plastic food stuff was passed over to the child in the tunic to demonstrate his point. Then he demonstrated a bridge technique where the tiger is booped on the nose with a long stick. Demonstration ensued.

            We climbed to the top of the rocky amphitheatre to watch the presentation. My little one wriggled to the front of the crowd on the top tier. She was transfixed on the little boy in the tiger outfit.

            “I want to be a mountain goat.”

            “Just watch what they’re going to do, they’re going to feed the tiger.” She turned back to the nose booping. “Would you like to go down to that side and get a better look at the tiger?”

            “Okay!”

            I’ll begin by saying what happened next was obviously my fault for a plethora of reasons. First, I wasn’t holding her hand. Second, I wasn’t firm in keeping her next to me at all times. Third, I am not the most graceful when navigating giant rocks on the downhill route.

As I began to pick my way past apathetic preteens with no sense of personal space or ability to keep their backpacks off the path (and their angry mothers shouting what I was thinking), my little sweetheart was booking it down the rocky embankment in a manner that I questioned whether she was mine. Amazed that I reached the bottom without causing a commotion, I looked around. I expected to see my child waiting patiently for me at the bottom of the rocks. No sign of her. Shit.

I walked around to the front of the crowd. I was looking low. She was wearing an eclectic blend of colours and a bright red hat. She should have been easy to spot. Then I heard it. A voice amplified by a microphone.

“No sweetie, we aren’t looking at other animals today, just tigers.” Fuck. I assertively moved to the front of the crowd to the right of the tiger. I’m sure there were irritated people but this was a bit of an emergency. The assault to my eyeballs was one part ridiculous and one-part embarrassment. Standing front and centre was my little Zoo Tot. The crowd was nonplussed. I was mortified. A volunteer moved forward to collect my now very downtrodden child. The volunteer was talking to her in low tones, probably asking which camp she was part of due to the hat. My kid’s chin was on her chest in obvious extreme disappointment.

“Yeah, she’s mine.” I said over the heads of the children in the front row. The volunteer’s head snapped up. She had a look of distain; judgement. Yep, I fucking lost my kid at the zoo. That’s NEVER happened to anyone else. She gently prodded my child toward me and we promptly left the area lest we became “the little girl who interrupted the tiger feeding and her idiot mom who can’t keep track of her.” A stern lecture ensued since this is not the first time she has wandered off and stolen the show. There was the dancing incident of 2016 (not my fault).

The lesson: Buy a fucking leash.

Later, when we were recounting this incident to Wade, he asked her why. Her response was given with the conviction of a very stubborn, moderately proud, nearly five-year-old, “I only wanted to be a mountain goat.” Well played, child. Well played.