The Comeback Kid

I'm beginning to think that Harrison needs a theme song. I may be decent with words, but jingles? Not so much. As of right now, the best I can do is mimic the commercials for the "Priceline Negotiator" and really, we should probably just leave it at that because without a doubt, this kid keeps (and will continue to keep for many, many years) us on our toes at all times with his mad logical skills. I could also quote a Miley Cyrus song, however that would mean admitting to having ever heard sung along with such awfulness, but again, really? He can't stop. And he won't stop. His memory is just too big and his vocabulary seems to be surpassing it on a constant basis.

Classic examples of my little Negotiator who sometimes seems to be too big for his skinny-legged britches (another truth we must face? he's got his daddy's long legs and finding pants that fit is also going to be challenging in the years ahead)? Let me give you a couple gems from, I kid you not, the last 36 hours:

Post-egg hunt at my parents' house on Easter morning, during which the children discovered various outdoor toy goodies left for them by the Easter Bunny along with the plethora of plastic eggs (because, let's face it, the E.B. dropped the ball and so had to rely on some gifts from the grandparents presented in Hunt fashion as opposed to baskets but totally works when your littles are still little enough to believe in things like said E.B.), a bubble blowing machine that the kids found was having a tough time of blowing any bubbles. You can imagine the dismay of a 3 and 5 y/o at such a turn of events, no? The toy had actually been at my folks' for a while, but was still unopened which is why we added it to the morning's loot, so when it failed to work, and we were wondering about the quality of batteries found within, my mom chimed in, "They probably need to be changed. That thing is like three years old." Which instantly caused my dear sweet Harrison to whip his head super fast to look at her and ask (in a pretty accusatory tone for a preschooler, I might add) "How do you know?!?!" Whoops! You got us there, kid!

Fast forward a handful of hours and the Welschies were so close, SO close, to being back home in Hastings, but clearly not close enough as all 5.5 of us had a very long trip back after our long weekend spent in SoDak. B and I thought it would be good to travel post-Easter dinner in hopes that kiddos would nap and we would still get home in time for supper and bedtime and all would be well. Oh, how wrong you can be as a parent.

Nothing awful, exactly, happened on the drive home, but our hopes and dreams of some peace and quiet in the car thanks to snoozing children quickly disappeared not 30 minutes into the drive when HD and RL were having pillow and stuffed animal fights and therefore a grand giggle fest in the back seat of the van, egging each other on to ignore their books and any and all commands, demands, potential rewards and consequences (i.e. losing Kindle. And stuffed animals. And blankets.) coming from B and I at the front of the van, and of course, there was the whole not-sleeping thing. For two type-A/first-borns/planners, this particular defeat was a rough one.

Linky, bless his heart, did sleep on the way home, but only for 45 minutes because then Raegge's bladder, which was also still very much not napping peacefully just like the rest of her, decided we needed to stop which of course woke Lincoln instantly. And we still had well over half of our trip to go. Yay.

So clearly by now, this post has turned from quirky notes about Harrison into full-blown post-vacation tirade on my part, but you know, you needed some background to understand just how done we all were as we rolled back into town late yesterday afternoon....

As we were a mere ten blocks from the sanctuary of our own house, Ben all of the sudden realized that the oldest two were now (playfully, but still) messing around by tugging RL's blanket (which was returned in the acceptance of oh-eff-it-clearly-you-are-not-going-to-sleep) back and forth and saying something about cutting each other. Lovely, eh? So Ben calls out from the passenger seat for them to knock it off and "change their language!" and, without missing a single beat, HD replies, "You mean like change from English to Spanish or something like that?"

I tried. I really, really tried, not to bust out laughing at that, but really? Where does he come up with this stuff?! As I let a big burst of air out of my cheeks, Ben tried to talk over me so the kids wouldn't hear me laughing so hard, and then, finally, blessedly, we pulled into our driveway and moved on to other similarly entertaining but escaping me at the moment shenanigans with The Comeback Kid.

We love him (and his literal/figurative smart mouth) so!