Tour

So Elijah has a new joke. From the sound of it, I assume his mother taught it to him. It goes like this: “Why do chickens sit on eggs?” (Don’t wait for your listener’s answer) “Because they don’t have any chairs!”

It’s actually a pretty funny joke. Made even funnier by Eli’s punch line delivery. He delivers the line in a coked-up 1980’s comedian style. He runs the words together, half shouting.

The best part is Eli has a hard time remembering the actual joke. So he takes to running his words together and mixes them with pure gibberish.

So it goes a little like this:

“Why chickens (garble garble) eggs? Theydon’thaveanychairs!”

So often the joke’s listener would feign laughter because they feel he has come to the punch line. Or they’ll look to me as a joke translator.

I’m not sure what that has to do with this next story, except they both involve Elijah speaking.

As I said in the last post, we’re trying again to sell our house. We get our real estate advice from Sisyphus. But this time we’ve enlisted the help of an actual realtor. Because what makes more sense than selling a house you’re sure to lose money on? Paying someone to do it.

Well, our realtor is actually a really nice guy and is bending over backwards to get our place sold. Part of the process was Diana taking him through the house to show him all the improvements we made.

As Diana went through the kitchen, pointing out our additions, “We added air conditioning…We replaced all the cabinets and painting them white…” Elijah walked along side offering his own tour of the house.

“This is Grover. He’s black…”

Ok. Hold on. Stop. I have to interrupt the story for a second. Whenever I leave town for business, Diana misses me, for sure. Eli and Luca could care less. But the family member who has the toughest time with me gone is Grover. He gets really depressed and gets a nervous stomach. He actually poops in our basement. I can’ tell you how happy that makes me. Except for the fact that Diana usually makes me clean it up when I get home.

Back to the story. When the tour of the house arrived in the basement, Diana pointed out our old water heater, and our storage and whatnot. But Elijah continued his tour as well, pointing out places where Grover pooped.

“Grover pooped there. He also pooped over there. And there…”

p.s. Bonus Eli story.

This morning when Eli woke up, I went in his room and rocked him on his chair for a couple minutes. Suddenly, he leapt off. He frowned and said, “That smells bad.”

I said, “What smells bad?”

He waved his hand in my general direction and said, “Your…whole…self,” and then he walked out of the room.