Ocho plays One Monkey and they miraculously jump off her back
Picked up Jake late this afternoon and he seemed tired – he said no one is getting sleep around his house – I said no kidding, let me guess, Eva? – yes, he said, Eva cries cries cries all through the night. We stopped in at Ace Hardware to get lock fix stuff for the door knob to the front of the LaLa that can’t manage to stay on. Then on the way back to the truck Jake asks in that adorable voice of his, “Ocho?” – yes, sweetie pie – “Can we listen to One Monkey when we get in the car?” – I tell him, “It’s locked and loaded – I thought about it as I was coming to pick you up.”
So we got in the truck and turned up One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show and both doo wopped down Louisiana Avenue – playing the song three times in a row.
We got home to absolute mayhem, a doorknob that wouldn’t fix, Loca wanting out of the kennel, Jake wanting to not watch the scary aliens on the Scooby Doo DVD, conf calls, changes of travel plans, work piling and piled still into the evening, and the canoe sitting there beckoning on the bayou. Roy came over to help with the doorknob, and Ocho was asked many questions about all the chaos and I realized why Jake is in my life – to teach me patience. You can’t get upset with a three and a half year old boy who is standing on one side of the door trying to look through the keyhole at Roy who is trying to fix an antique lock that is so stripped and so delicate, it’s a wonder anyone would call it a latch or a lock – meanwhile Jake says, “I see you” through the hole and despite my entire body wanting to incinerate from everything, I just have to laugh.
Jake regales me with tales of a giant crane that came down to lift him off the new bar stools his parents bought for the newly remodelled kitchen and then takes the whole entire family and throws them out the front door, or its his shoes that have the imprint of dinosaur feet on the bottom and he calls them “sand shoes” because they make animal tracks in the sand and then it is the scary aliens in Scooby Doo that look sort of like Dead Ed, the Halloween scare toy I bought at Walgreens, that has half a body and crawls on the floor shouting inanities such as “watch your pets, I have to crawl through this” while shrieking preternaturally and eyes flash alien red.
L asks the same question every week – if this isn’t a good week to pick him up, you can do it another day. And I answer the same way, this week is no different from every other week of my life – in the meantime, it’s the best day to pick him up. Jake does more for Ocho than Ocho for Jake.