Brevity and Books

I'm Chris Melanoma. Patrick Shirley's wart. Not his wart. Not his wart! I'm... I'm the wart. He's my tumor. My... my growth. My... uh, my pimple. I'm Papa Wart. Just old Chris "Wart" Shirley. That's what they call me, or Melanoma Head. They'll call me that. "Melanoma Head's coming." I'm... father! Patrick Shirley's father!


Remember that kid from school who always had the warts? P boy is that kid. Kate has been working hard to get rid of the warts with the help of Dr. Scholls. He has one on his foot that is pretty big, and in order for the medicine to work, we have to peel off the dried medicine from the previous application. Patrick doesn't do pain. He is a guy after all. Recently I had to straddle him, holding his legs straight and pinning his arms to the side while the nurse worked her magic. My back was facing P's face, so he decided to head butt me to get me off. When that didn't work he resorted to a more dirty tactic. He blasted me with a man sized fart. And it worked. I let him go.


In light of this sordid tale I was concerned when I saw that he had a loose tooth this week. I knew he wouldn't pull it himself, but it needed to come out, and I didn't want to get defiled while doing it. Much to my amazement he pulled the tooth by himself. This is a breakthrough.


Now I just need to give him a quarter to go down and have a rat gnaw that thing off his foot.


I have always tried to instill a love of reading in my kids. I have tried to make time to read to them and help them develop of love of books. So you can imagine how happy I am to have the kids begging us to take them to library nearly every day. I can't take the credit, though. Kate was the one who introduced them to checking books out from the library.


Patrick picks out books that are for beginners, and has become a pretty good reader. Samantha picks whatever strikes her fancy, since Whit will read them to her. Bean doesn't care. She just likes to annoy the librarians with her yelling. Whitney will pick up three 100 page chapter books at a time, then finish all of them in one day.


I don't mind taking them to the library. It's one habit I will gladly feed. If they want to spend all of their time with books instead of Nintendos and cartoons, I can live with that.





I promised to take them to the library tonight. When we got there we found that it closes early on Friday night, so we weren't able to get new books. Whitney and Samantha were so upset that you would have thought someone had shot their dog...

Bean prefers Faulkner...