Overheard: Feelin' the pain

Josiah was complaining a few weeks ago about how he didn't sleep well with Grace in his room the very first night, since she was repeatedly rolling over and hitting the wall and the sides of the bed. Robert apparently made one too many jokes about this…

Josiah [totally serious]: After I get tired of having her in my room, she'll sleep in your room, Robert. Then you can feel the pain.

~~~~~

Grace found the chewable Benadryl I had decided to keep in my pocketbook just in case she gets an insect bite while we are away from home, since I've seen further proof of how badly she can react. I explained the purpose of it:

Me: It’s so I can give you medicine if you get bit by ants--

Grace [interrupting]: Or a dinosaur, or a croc-ah-di-yal, or a bay-yah…

Hmmm…I have never seen even one dinosaur, crocodile, or bear in our county. I was really thinking more along the lines of ants and bees.

~~~~~

Josiah: Is it OK to look in the toaster oven when it’s on?

Later…

Josiah: It’s a good thing we don’t have the kind of oven door you can see through--this way, we don’t see the lasers.

Me: There are no lasers in our oven.

Jason Slade: Yeah, we did away with those years ago.

Why the endless questions? (Because, believe me, there‘s more of his questions I can‘t even remember at the moment.) Why the fascination with lasers? Because while Josiah was with me during The Great Swimsuit Quest of 2009, he looked into a price checker at Kohl’s. He immediately got a severe headache as well as blurry vision for about 10-15 minutes. I sat him down until it passed, and then walked with him back to Customer Service to ask what one might expect when one’s child looked into one of the price checkers. The clerk looked bewildered and said, “Ummmm…I don’t know. No one has ever done that before.”

To which I thought, “Yeah, right!"

(Josiah's not the only one to do this. Right? I mean, I don't personally know of anyone who has done this besides him, but...uh, oh...)

It has made such an impression on him that he did it again that same afternoon with another price checker.

In actuality, he didn’t really look into the second price checker; he was about to take another look but merely saw the red laser zigzagging. He was traumatized all over again, prompting another severe headache. Since that time, Josiah has occasionally had recurrent but very short-term headaches whenever he recalls this traumatic event…or whenever he imagines lasers in our toaster oven. I have checked with his pediatrician, explaining that he is my little hypochondriac on the dramatic side, and she said that the headaches are brought on by his panicky state in recalling the event…especially since the headaches only last a minute or less.

~~~~~

Jason Slade [going over some ground rules with Grace]: You don’t hit the people you love. You don’t kick the people you love.

Grace [completely serious]: No. You hug dem, you kiss dem, and you bake for dem.