Oompa Loompa

Hey, who wants a totally bats**t crazy baby? I've got one for sale!

I swear, there are some great moments to be had in between the tantrums, demands, and mess-making. I'll make you a deal!

***

Josh had to work the Emmys last night, so I took the kids to Target to kill time. The Halloween stuff is out, so it's better than Disneyland for Cole. (It's fun to say that and know it's literally true, since at no point did he ask to go home while wandering the aisles.) Anyway, after staring longingly at the swords and skeletons, he fixated on a spooky portrait-thing--a framed image of an 18th-century man sitting on a throne of some kind. If you moved slightly, it transformed into a grotesque skeleton with burning red eyes. He wanted to look at it for a long time, turning it this way and that, pushing the button that cued up the spooky music.

It stayed with him, and later that night, he asked me how the man in the picture turned into a skeleton. Lacking a better term, I told him it was a hologram, and showed him another one of his books that used the same effect on its cover. He got it, but was still rattled.

Later, left alone in his dark room at bedtime, he couldn't stop thinking about it, so he came out to the living room in his alligator pajamas. I was holding my phone, so I wrote down verbatim what he told me:

"My brain keeps showing me that picture, that hologram, mom. Even though I tell it that it is just pretend, it keeps coming on. My brain just keep showing me it. Isn't that weird what my brain is doing? My brain isn't listening to the message my body is sending."

I could not love that kid more. We went back into his room and I turned on every light, every lamp. We investigated the closet, under his bed, behind the toy box. And finally, he slept.

***

Yes, it's straight out of "Family Circus," but it turns out these things are much more adorable in real life than in those badly drawn cartoon circles: Yesterday, when recalling Saturday's haircut, Cole said, "Hey mom, remember when we went to that salami?"

It took me a beat to realize he meant "salon."

***

For those of you interested in the latest antics of our other in-house specimen, here's video. Note the lack of remorse.

She really is Mr. Peepers sometimes.