A Case of Torture

There’s some well-known reference to watching the Giants play baseball being akin to “torture.”  Apparently they can be inconsistent, letting the other team start to make a comeback before finishing them off.  Over the last three weeks we’ve had our fair share of torture.  Below, the evidence:

Exhibit A: James put on a brave face and traveled across the country, by himself, with a 19-month old.  It was like putting a wild caged animal in a shoebox.  Thank goodness for dried blueberries.

Exhibit B: On the way home, we ran into Jakey’s best friend from school, Helen, in Dallas Fort-Worth.  She was sitting two rows behind us on the plane home.  All he could do was stand on his seat and look at her longingly, “Hellen.  Hellen!”

Exhibit C: You know that scene in a Christmas Story where Ralphie has to try on the pink bunny suit his aunt made him?  That was Jake on Halloween at school when we put him in his ducky costume for the parade.  All tears and no’s and writhing around.  I have some thoughts on Halloween costumes that might deserve their own separate blog.

Exhibit D: For our Hawoween! (Halloween) party, I decided to make cupcakes.  Pumpkin with cream cheese frosting and lemon with chocolate frosting.  Jakey got to help me, mostly by watching from the confines of his high chair and licking his first set of beaters.  The cupcakes were cooling on the kitchen table all morning, before I frosted them.  They were truly haunting Jacob… pure torture.  Cupcake, cuuuuuupcake.  I wandered into the kitchen to find Jake had commandeered an orange plastic fork, deftly stabbing an unfrosted cupcake and dragging it over to the side of the table so he could reach it.  That was his first cupcake on Halloween.  His second was the “fear the beard” cupcake.

Exhibit E: On Halloween night, Shasta did not disappoint.  Seeing as it was a Sunday, we thought there might be fewer trick-or-treaters this year.  Perhaps.  We estimate we were visited by no fewer than 550 little princesses, Scream masks and a weird gorilla with a personal photographer.  We even got the headless ducky to put his head (hood) on for awhile.  His dad gave him a flashlight and he would shove it in his mouth, making his face glow in a spooky, chubby-cheeked kind of way.  He wore the yellow and orange striped leggings that went with his costume and some sandals I put on him.  Most people thought he was a girl.  We saw one other kid in the same exact costume.  She also looked cute.  Jake threw candy in bags (and many times onto the porch) for almost two hours.  He is our household’s most generous doorman, as he prefers to double-fist it.  The good news: He had no idea that “tandy” is edible.  Then my mom told him this weekend.  I think the gig is up.  After awhile the novelty wore-off and our tired, tortured little ducky laid down on the porch.

Exhibit F: Monday night, there were still some cupcakes left over that I’d left on the Halloween cupcake stand.  They continued to torture Jake from the other room as he ate his dinner.  He could no longer resist their taunting whispers and alluring gaze… his ears closed up, his vision was obscured with tears and his world would end unless he had… cuuuuuupcake.

After three cupcakes in two days, there was no better solution to ending our “October of Torture” than…

the trash can.