My Seussical Life for 2004 March 9

I suffered last night from a disconcerting dream in which Atticus was poisoned by a snake. We were, as I dreamed, in the reptile house of some zoo when Atticus removed a small red snake from it's glass cage when I was not looking. When I noticed the snake in his hands and tried to safely take it away, he shoved it into his mouth, bit off and swallowed a large portion. This ingestion is what poisoned him.

It is silly of me to even remark on this dream. What is it about dreams that seems so poignant in the night? On the other hand, Atticus is well today, and Samuel is not gnawing his hand off as much as he was yesterday. I should check his molars to see if they've cut through.

Today, while Atticus and I were uneventfully eating our lunch (Samuel had previously eaten), I noticed the eerie silence--the kind a parent intuitively knows means trouble--coming from the boy's room where Samuel was playing. I went right in to check on him, and things were just as I'd suspected. Samuel was very contentedly sitting on the end of Atticus' bed with a 42 ounce canister of oats. He happily continued dipping his small hand in for a scoop and scattering the oats on the bed and on the floor. When Atticus discovered this activity, he jumped in on it and expanded the mess to include the hallway, my bedroom, and my bed.

Oats, evidently, are difficult to vacumn--they break apart when they enter the mouth of the vacumn, and though most of the fragments end up staying IN the machine, a good amount is transformed into a coarse dust that is even more difficult to remove from the carpet.

In an effort to keep my humor and temper my frustration with the mess,(and as my dear mother-in-law, Betty, once told me she's done in the past on such occasions) I pulled out the camera and took a picture.