Ryan Boy

My family is very fond of the movie "Tommy Boy" (who isn't??) We introduced this amazing film to my two youngest brothers this past week while Tim, Jean, and Weston were visiting. One of my favorite scenes is when Tommy (the unfortunately late Chris Farley) and Richard (David Spade - really, why couldn't it have been him) are preparing for an important sales call. It goes like this:

Richard: All right, now it's sale time, so remember, we don't take no...?
Tommy: No sh** from anyone.
Richard: No.
Tommy: Um, we don't take no prisoners.
Richard: We don't take no for answer.
Tommy: Oh yeah... We don't take no for an answer! We don't take no for an answer...

Why am I sharing this with you, you wonder? Because I had a similar conversation with Ryan today. We were strolling through a store and Killian had my keys as entertainment. I have a few key covers that are rubbery monsters. Anyway, our conversation went like this:

Me: Ew, Killian! Why are you chewing on my keychain? You're going to bite off the hand!
Ryan: Baby eating monster.
Me: That's right. Why is he doing that? We do not eat . . .
Ryan: POOP!
Me: No.
Ryan: TOOT!
Me: No.
Ryan: . . . Monster poop?
Me: (sigh) Keychains, Ryan . . . We do not eat keychains.
Ryan: . . . I eat poop.

Our conversations often end and begin with that statement.

PS- You'll notice in the picture that 2 of the monsters are each missing a hand. Apparently "we" do eat keychains.

MacGyver: Eat Your Heart Out!

My blog is turning into "The Nanny Diaries" because a lot of these posts are about Ryan, but that's probably because the majority of my time this summer has been spent working.

Anyway, one of our latest adventures involved Ryan and a wardrobe malfunction. Ryan has to take medicine every day which I sprinkle into pudding or baby food (he loves eating Killian's baby food). On this particular day, we were away from Ryan's home and were between camp and his occupational therapy session. I decided to give him his lunch at a central location (which happened to be Janae's house- where I am currently housesitting). Ryan begged to have baby food with his medicine, so I gave him a tiny plastic tub of pureed peaches. He was doing well feeding himself for a few minutes....and then I heard "uh-ohh". This is NEVER a good utterance. It always implies that I am going to be a) annoyed, b) on my knees scrubbing something out of the carpet, c) swearing to myself to never let this happen again. I braced myself to face the reason for the "uh-oh" and found a pureed peach-covered Ryan. It was all over his shirt. I was grateful that it wasn't all over anything else, but I quickly realized that I had nothing to change Ryan into. If you don't have the pleasure of being in contact with peach baby food, let me tell you - the stuff STINKS! I don't know why. Regular peaches smell yummy. Peach-scented things smell delightful. Peach baby food - awful. I knew I didn't have time to wash his shirt, and I knew he couldn't walk around smelling like that. I had to come up with something fast. I had a few shirts at the house, so I tried about 4 of them on Ryan hoping that one would be ok enough to last him through his OT session. No luck- my shirts were v-necks and always left at least one of his bare shoulders exposed. I knew Killian's clothes were all way too small for Ryan (Ryan is a very big 4 year-old). My eyes fixated on my last hope: one of Jay's wifebeaters was draped on he arm of the chouch. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with this term- a wifebeater is a white tanktop undershirt made by manufacturers such as Hanes and Fruit of the Loom. Wifebeaters serve as the main ingredient in white trash wardrobe and are worn as an outershirt, often paired with a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels). I quickly MacGyvered the large-sized wifebeater into a presentable 4 year-old tank top using 2 hair clips to pull the "sleeves" onto Ryan's shoulders, and tucked the 2 feet of excess fabric into his shorts. I'm not going to lie- I was pretty pleased with myself after viewing the resulting look. Ryan looked kind of old-fashioned, like he was going to take a dip in the ol' swimmin' hole. Ryan was also pleased with his fashion statement. He strutted around with his belly sticking out and played with the straps of the top for the entire 2 hours in which he adorned it. I was a little embarassed when we arrived for the OT session, but his therapist got a good laugh out of it.
I had to practically beg Ryan to change his shirt when we got home, but not until after this little photo shoot: