"It was so embarrassing!", Carter said as we chatted about the surprise note I left inside his lunch box last Thursday. In fact, it was on this particular school morning I packed Carter's lunch box before Mom came home and discovered two pudding cups! I was so tired from working the night before that I packed his favorite sandwich, two cheese packs, and two pudding cups, thinking how nutritious that would be for lunch! Anyways, by Friday evening we chatted more about his school friends, butt-cracks, books, video games, and the secrets he wanted to tell me. Like the time he waited for Shawn to leave home, so that he could sneak up into the attic and look for cigarettes in his dresser drawers but discovered a fifty-dollar bill instead. No sooner had he found a fifty dollar bill did he have to return the green back to its rightful owner. Carter kept the money as if he could somehow get Shawn to confess his purchases. Later on, he asked questions like "who will you marry?" and "when will you have a baby?", then expressed how much he disliked it when Melissa answered those very same questions, adding sheer mockery in his voice..."Well, we will just have to wait and see!!!". "Melissa has too many secrets", he said.
"I like secrets", Carter said to me with such glee. For a split second, my big sister aetna swore she heard the word
cegret, aka cigarettes, then quickly realized what he meant. Carter immediately corrected my assumption, and I absolutely had to stand still in the living room while he explained the difference between a
cegret and a secret, claiming "secrets are what people keep to themselves" and "cegrets are smoking", and "I like secrets". Just like the
Inspector Gadget cartoon, Melissa once reigned as the family's professional spy. Last Friday night, Carter officially became
Curious George in the memory book of another one of my sibling chapters.
