Then one night, There's a scream in the night, and you'll wonder who could that have been? (HOL 57)

House of Laughter 57

I don’t know if Isaac will ever read these in the future, but if he does, this last week is the reason that when he is 16 years old, I will go into his room every night for a week at three in the morning and demand to play X-box, and scream until he wakes up and plays with me.

Payback is a bitch.

At first Nancy would get up and try to put him back down. I assured her that crying would not kill him. (With earplugs, I can sleep through it.) If Nancy asks me to get up, I walk in his room and say in a stern voice, “Isaac, lie down!” and he flops down face first on the bed. No one in this house has slept for more than four consecutive hours for almost a week now.

Isaac has become obsessed with a book, “On the Farm”. If I sit down to read with him at night, that has to be the first book we read. It has about a dozen flaps on each page which open to reveal more information about life on the farm. We read it because he loves it, but there are two reasons I love it too.

1) If you lift the flap for “Grapes”, there is a picture of a big barrel behind it and the caption says “Grapes are used to make wine.”

2) The book is about a family of pigs that own a farm. The farmer pig wears overalls, and his wife wears a dress. The great thing is that, THEY HAVE PIGS ON THEIR FARM. It’s like some crazy porcine Texas Chainsaw massacre thing. How do they decide which pigs get to wear coveralls and shear the sheep and which ones get sent to becomes Neese’s extra spicy sausage?

Last Wednesday night, Nancy had a migraine and went to bed after work. In a bizarre, unrelated coincidence, there was no dinner waiting for me when I got home. I took Isaac to church for the Wednesday night dinner and got a small peek at the life of a single parent.

I thought I could put Isaac in a high chair, go get dinner, and eat. The only problem is that Isaac would scream if he couldn’t see me. Every step retrieving our dinner involved a great deal of screaming and guilt. Thankfully, a young woman at our table, Mariah, distracted him for a few minutes at a time. By the end of the meal, my nerves were fried, and I was not looking forward to trying to clean up and wrangle the boy, so I announced to the table, “All right village, who is going to help me clean up this tray?”. My buddy Hayden was a good sport and took over clean up for me.

Isaac has started pulling up his shirt at school or around the house and playing his belly like a drum. He learned that by watching Nancy.

Strength and Honor,

Big Matt

Also my co-worker Diane thought that the boy in this ad looked like Isaac circa 2010. Sounds like something he would say.