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Friday, September 1, 2017

7 Quick Takes about My Life as a Picture Book, Cereal Night, and a Suggested Playlist for Pee-Wee Soccer

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

1


Sometimes I suspect that when Laura Numeroff wrote If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, she actually ripped off the idea from my own life.

For example, here's a few lines I wrote about my week just now:

If your kids swing on the living room curtains like a jungle vine, they're going to rip the whole rod out of the wall.

If the rod takes a big chunk of the wall with it, you'll need to patch up the hole.

If you patch up the hole, you'll need to paint over it.

You'll be all out of matching paint, so you'll have to buy some at the paint store.

But when you paint the spot, you'll find it still doesn't match because the original paint has faded. So you'll have to repaint the entire wall.

If you decide to repaint the wall, you'll have to move the 10-ton piano, tape the corners, remove the light switch covers, change into painting clothes, and spend a good part of the morning painting it.

Then you'll threaten to drop your children off at the fire station if they ever hang on the curtains again.

The End.

It's not exactly the same, but I think you can definitely see the similarities. Someone definitely owes me some royalties.

2


I've recently decided that bath toys are disgusting. Who among us hasn't been horrified when our child pulls their favorite squirty fish out of their mouth, squeezes it, and a stream of black mold comes shooting out?

Bath toys are gross, and to the trash they went. So long, harbingers of waterborne disease.

The kids weren't on board at first. Until I told them that from now on when it's time for a bath, they can borrow a pot from the kitchen and fill it up with as many kitchen utensils as they want.

You should've seen how much fun they had in the tub yesterday with a skillet, a potato masher, and a ladle.

Now, if only I could get them to stop drinking the bathwater.

3


With school starting in just a few more days, I couldn't procrastinate much longer. I had to take the kids school supply shopping.

I set the older three loose in Staples with their lists and helped the kindergartner find everything she needed, and I was surprised at how quickly we got it all done. I paid dearly for the convenience, though, because the older kids seem to have picked the most expensive brand of everything.

A few of their items weren't at Staples so once we got home I bought them online. It didn't occur to me until I clicked 'order' that I could have just done all of it online in the first place.

Note to self: Wal-Mart.com has two-day shipping now and you're an idiot.

4


We have a box of soccer cleats of pretty much all sizes in the attic, and even though numerically it looked like one of those pairs should fit my son, they were all either too big or too small.

Shoe sizes continue to mystify me.

Why are there half sizes once you get to toddler size 6 but not before that?

Why do we go to size 13 and start over?

Why do girls' and women's sizes overlap?

Why aren't boys' and girls' sizes the same?

I still have so many questions.

I was about 8 years into motherhood before I even began to wrap my head around the progression of U.S. shoe sizes from infant to adult.

Call me crazy, but our country's shoe sizing system should not be so complicated that it makes me seriously consider moving to Europe.

5


Usually when Phillip travels for work, we have simple no-cook dinners like yogurt parfaits. I suppose you could argue that parfaits aren't actually a dinner, but they're at least a little bit healthy.

This week Phillip went out of town for an overnight trip and what we ate was neither dinner nor healthy. It was cereal night.

The kids LOVE cereal night.

Aside from plain off-brand Cheerios and the box of Bran Flakes that's been in the pantry since probably 2015, we don't really buy cereal. So it's a big deal when I bring home not one, not two, but three boxes of processed sugar and call it "dinner."

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
The "fruity-shaped marshmallows" in the Froot Loops even came pre-staled! So tasty!

My 5-year-old was practically dancing with excitement when we picked them out in the grocery store. "Can we eat outside??" she squealed. "Last time we had cereal night, we ate outside." She then proceeded to tell me every detail of that night, everything from what kinds of cereal we had to what she was wearing.

This from a child who remembers nothing about family vacations or basically anything fun we've ever done.

I guess if we really want her to look back fondly on her childhood, all we need to do is have cereal night more often.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}
This is all the cereals mixed together, in case you were wondering how gross kids are.

And yes, we did eat outside.

6


I was a few minutes early when I went to pick up my 13-year-old from soccer practice, so I parked in front of the field and turned on the radio. It happened to be on the classical station, which I'd turned on the other day before taking my car to the mechanic so he'd think I was smart.

What it was playing at that moment made me laugh out loud in my car, because I was simultaneously watching the pee-wee team scrimmaging right in front of my windshield.

Try to visualize it as you listen to the song. If you've never seen a pee-wee game, picture a clump of a dozen uncoordinated 5-year-olds chasing the ball, tripping over each other, tripping over the ball, tripping over nothing, falling down, swinging at the ball and missing... and then there's always one kid at the other end of the field twirling in circles and playing with grass.

It needs this soundtrack.



7


I am in love with a kids' book series I stumbled across at my library called Building Blocks of Science. They're nonfiction books about every topic in science you can imagine, written in graphic novel style. And they are funny. My son can't stop reading them.

Because of Building Blocks of Science he knows all about electricity and plant life cycles and the human endocrine system. But I looked up to see him reading one this week and realized that the cover illustration was quite unfortunate. Well, just the color, really.

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?  {posted @ Unremarkable Files}

I realized after a moment that the little red guy was "matter," and I was looking at how matter changes from liquid to solid to gas.

It was not, as I first thought, a violent depiction of a smiling psychopath leaping out of a pool of blood.

I suppose this doesn't make the series sound all that great. Don't get me wrong: I love these books, I guess I'd just be really bad at writing commercials.

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3 comments:

  1. Ok Take #1 is my life exactly these days! We moved into our new house and there are so many, MANY projects but no idea where to begin. "OK so we need to move some toys downstairs but the storage needs to be moved to the garage. But the garage needs to be fixed in ways A-Z before we can do that. Before we can do A-Z in the garage we need to fix the door to the shed. To that..." etc. etc. etc.

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  2. Our family always LOVED it when Dad traveled and we could eat non-real-food for dinners. Popcorn and apples were our favorite go-to when Dad was away. Considering that my Dad has traveled 3 months a year since I was 13...that's a lot of popcorn and apples. I still love both.

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  3. Umm, speaking of royalties...#2, I believe you got the toxic tub toy idea from me this week?? I'll take cash, check, or money order please! ;)
    Cereal is the best!! But marshmallows in the froot loops???? That's just icky.

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