Spoonman, Come Together With Your Hands
The sitter is on vacation. She was gone all last week and will be gone through the end of this week. This has caused much turmoil and irregularity in the daily schedule of my household as one would probably imagine. SB, being a little more than slightly anal retentive when it comes to her daily habits, has been particularly affected by the uprooting of the routine.
Last week the girls stayed with my middlest sister on Monday then we all crammed into the little Cavvy that could and puttered up to Wausau, WI (by way of Oconto, WI which isn’t exactly an as-the-crow-flies sort of route if you know what I mean) to visit my sister-in-law and nieces for a few days. We got home late Thursday then spent Friday taking care of overdue business. The girls got their hair cut (SB’s first cut during which I restrained myself and held back my tears) and SB had a physical and got some shots. Good times.
Saturday PK took a make-up kah-rah-tay class then when to her dad’s. SB stayed with my parentals while I took a much needed afternoon off at the movies. After the movie my middlest sister and her daughter came back home with me again so they could stay with SB on Monday when I went to work. On Sunday we attempted to go to church but SB was too overwrought and only lasted about five minutes.
On the way home from church we stopped at the shelter to look at the doggies although SB really wanted to look at the kitties. As many of you know I don’t do kitties so she was sorely disappointed. We did find a sweet little puppy that didn’t make her shake in fear though. It’s a little 10 month old male Maltese with the unfortunate name of Fluffy Wuffy. Even more unfortunate was the car accident that cost him one of his front legs. Poor puppy. With my love of strays (animals and men, one and the same really) don’t be surprised if I’m adopting soon.
Anyway, Monday SB stayed with the middlest sister and then the littlest sister came to take over as the relief handler for my small spy. So far the week has been going well and today we only had one minor skirmish that ended in a time out that didn’t include screaming, thrashing or punching. I love progress.
For dinner tonight my dear sister decided to treat us to Applebee’s. Yeah, not classy or anything but up here in the sticks we take what we can get. When we got home to eat (carside service, love it!) I grabbed the bottle of ranch dressing out of the fridge to pour on my fries. Sitting at the table I pried the top bun off of the cheese that was cementing it the chicken patty. Weird thing about Applebee’s. If you order a Zesty Ranch Chicken Sandwich but request that they hold the buffalo sause they also hold the ranch dressing. I’m really not sure why but they’ve done it every time I’ve ordered it from this particular restaurant. Digression done, I opened the bottle of ranch dressing to add it to my ranch-less Zesty Ranch Chicken Sandwich and as I was tipping it I felt something clunk in the bottle.
Bottles of dressing should not clunk and so I peered into the bottle and saw nothing but white dressing with little bits of green seasonings and one long thin piece of seasoning along the side. Except that was too long to be seasoning so I tilted the bottle at a different angle and gazed in again. As the dressing shifted in the bottle the mysterious object stayed put and I was able to make out a piece of metal with Gerber embossed in it.
Just as I was making that out it finally registered that SB was trying to tell me something and I focused on her voice just in time to catch her saying “my spoon”. Her spoon. I quickly pieced together the story. SB wanted to eat some ranch dressing so she grabbed a baby spoon from the drawer (she grabbed the baby spoon ostensibly because a regular one wouldn’t have fit through the mouth of the bottle) and tried to dig in. There wasn’t enough dressing in the bottle though and in the process of trying to reach the bottom of the bottle she dropped the spoon. Instead of alerting someone to this predicament she decided to just recap the bottle and put it back in the refrigerator.
It’s been a rough couple weeks with SB but I saw today as the turning point so I decided not to get upset. And I left the spoon in the bottle.
