Responsibility

Lucy has a magnetic Responsibility Chart, where she gets to win magnets for doing things like Being Nice, Not Whining, Cleaning Your Room, etc. When she gets it all filled up, she will be able to buy a baby stroller for Megan, the newest addition to her imaginary family.

On Saturday, she made a colossal mess of her room. In what seemed like an effort to ward off my inevitable request that she clean her room, she brought me the responsibility chart.

"Here, Mom. I don't want this anymore."
"Babe, what's the deal?"
"Well, I don't want to do my responsibilities anymore, so can you please put this away?"
"But that's how you will get your baby stroller, by doing your responsibilities."
"I don't want to."
"Well, I don't want to do my responsibilities sometimes either but..."
"Well, I don't want to."

Jason managed to convince her to clean her room Sunday, but it took lots of threats and bribes and about three hours. The responsibility chart is hanging from our bedroom doorknob, untouched since Saturday's shirking.

To My Health

Dad started having chest and arm pain around 11 p.m. Wednesday. We went to the emergency room at the Heart Hospital, which I highly recommend — they have a full-service ER for non-heart-related problems, but it's a well-kept secret, so there's rarely someone with a stab wound in the waiting room.

In the ER, he sat in a snarl of wires and tubes and detailed his long — and not great — medical history. After a three-hour work-up, they decided to admit him and do an angiogram the next day.

While his bill of health is not exactly clean, he has no apparent heart problems! Twenty-two hours and one negative angiogram later, he was back at our house smoking a cigarette. Meanwhile, I went for a run in the dark, appreciating the strong legs that propelled me and the healthy heart that fueled every step. Thanks, body.

Fairy Fury

Lu: "DAD, I need to cut that fairy out RIGHT NOW."

Jason: "No, babe, you need to eat your toast."

Lu: "Okay, well, Dad, you need to cut that fairy out. And you better be done cutting that fairy out before I finish eating my toast. Or else."

Jason: "Or else what?"

Lucy: "Or else I am going to be angry with you."

The man was done cutting the fairy out before she finished eating her toast.

Shameless JCPenney Plug

So I rarely talk about job specifics, but this is a project I've been working on that needs (and I think deserves) some exposure, so I am exploiting my readership of three. It's a weekly shopping show for JCPenney (the account I work on) designed to take the contents of their weekly newspaper circular and package it in a hipper, more online-friendly way. We've been shooting every week and having an edit of the show ready THE NEXT DAY, which is insane, but feels very TV news and exciting. Our director-editor is a bad-ass (as is the entire team, really).

This is the reason the blogs have been sparse lately. Also the reason I did not accomplish much on my Lu-free to-do list. It was worth it, I think. Watch it several times and go immediately to JCPenney and buy stuff. And tell all your friends.