7 Quick Takes about Cleanup Songs I Can Relate To, A Real-Life Application for Cut and Paste, and Modeling Jobs for People with Too Many Legs

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! For most of the week, Phillip was out of town and the two oldest kids were away at church camp, so it was just me and the youngest four kids. I don't even know how to cook for just five people. It was super-weird. How was your week?

—1—

I was combing through YouTube, looking for a cleanup song that might motivate certain sluggish children. Anyone else ever done that? 99% of what I found was of the insipid "clean up, clean up, everybody, everywhere" variety, but I also stumbled across a diamond in the rough:



This cleanup rap was punctuated with comments like "Stop lookin' at me crazy, LET'S GO!" and "All these pictures of clean houses on the Internet... I'm like, These people don't have kids!"

When he lost it at the end and started crying and begging the kids to just pick up SOMETHING, I knew I'd found something special.  I don't know this guy, but I feel like we're living the same life.

—2—

We went to the beach and one of the kids needed me to take them to the bathroom. A row of Port-a-Potties had just been trucked in for some event happening at the beach the next day, so with a heavy heart I took my child's hand and walked toward them.

For the record, I hate taking kids inside a Port-a-Potty. They touch everything and take forever and insist on holding a 5-minute long Q&A session about the fecal matter they can see down the hole and I'm gagging right now even thinking about it.

But this time, it was different. It was brand-spanking new: we watched a guy snip the zip ties holding the doors shut as we approached. And it was SO CLEAN. There were no smells. Nothing nasty on the floor or seat. Nothing of interest in the toilet for my kid to hold a press conference about. I never thought I'd say this about visiting a Port-a-Potty, but it was an amazing experience.

After we walked out I looked back and saw that my toddler had tracked a bunch of mud in there and it looked every bit as gross as the Port-a-Potties I so dread entering. So it doesn't take long, I guess.

—3—

I think God wants Phillip to stop traveling for work, because lately his trips have been kind of a disaster. Last week he was in Michigan and missed his flight home, and there wasn't another one until Saturday morning. When he showed up on Saturday morning, it was so foggy they kept delaying the flight for hours and hours until they finally canceled it altogether.

He tried again on Sunday. After the first time he went through security he was told his carryon bag full of work equipment was "too heavy" and "could be used as a blunt object" so he had to go back and check it, and both times he went through security he was randomly selected to have his hands wiped for traces of explosives.

Then he remembered his car keys in his carryon and went back to retrieve them just in case something happened to his bag, and on the way back through security he was randomly selected for the explosive wipes a third time.

After another delay, his flight got in around 10:30 that night, which was barely enough time to wash and dry his clothes before he had to catch a 5 AM flight for his next trip to Pennsylvania the following morning.

As if we didn't get the message, his flight home from that trip was also delayed by several hours. Don't worry, we got it loud and clear. He's not going anywhere until at least September.

—4—

My middle schooler told me her friends play a game where if one of them says something weird you yell "copy!"

And then later when you yell "paste" at a random time they have to repeat it.

I'll keep that in mind for the next time the kids say "You're right, Mom."

—5—

I was doing some online shopping when my 6-year-old walked in, looked at the product images I was browsing, and said, "Why does she have so many feet?"

It was a valid question.

—6—

Today is the last day of my kids' swimming lessons at the high school pool, and I'm proud to say we've been on time every day for two whole weeks. One time we even got there early and my kids literally did not know what to do. I dropped them off and they came back out saying, "No one's in the water!" It was that unprecedented.

While the older kids are in their lessons, I pass the time with my 2- and 4-year-old by letting them bike around on the sidewalk or walking around the school. They've made friends with one of the maintenance guys. One day they saw him up on a ladder running some kind of cord up to the ceiling, and they were mesmerized.

The maintenance guy asked if they wanted to "help" and told them to hold the cord and cut a section off for each of them to take home. They talk about it all the time now and this guy says hi to the boys every time he sees us.

Also, if you ask my 4-year-old what he wants to be when he grows up, he answers "a worker."

—7—

We have a pizza stone in our cupboard that I've never used, even though we make pizza at home all the time.

I thought I'd give it a shot this week, and even though I don't have a paddle, the Internet assured me it would work just fine to assemble the pizza on the counter, slide it onto a baking sheet, and then easily transfer it to the pizza stone.

Lies.

This looked like Jabba the Hut after it was cooked.

Moving it to the baking sheet was such a disaster I didn't even attempt to put it on the pizza stone. Stupid world wide web. I don't know why I believe a word you say anymore.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Namibia

Don't feel bad if you didn't know where Namibia was before this week. You probably haven't had a reason to!

My kids put Namibia on our itinerary of world countries to learn about this summer and I'm not going to lie, it wasn't easy to find resources on the second-most sparsely populated country on Earth. But with a little determination and inter-library loan, anything is possible.

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means I may earn a small percentage of your purchases as commission if you buy anything. Like a mattress salesman, but with less hovering when you're trying to pull the trigger on your decision.

Monday

The kids found Namibia on the map and filled out their passport pages. When I started doing this, all the kids were little and needed help, and now I have a middle-schooler who knows more about geography than I do.

These passport pages have been a great help to us during The Educational Summer Vacation and you're welcome to download and use them for free.

Click to download blank sheets.

In the early years I used to bind the passport pages in a book with an official-looking cover and personalize each one with that kid's picture; these days I print out a stack and staple at the corner.

Both are valid options.

Flag of Namibia: crayon, 2018.

While the kids researched and drew the flag of Namibia, we listened to the national anthem. The Namibian national anthem is one of the prettiest ones I've heard so far. 

Tuesday

This was news to me, but Namibia used to be a German colony called German South West Africa. Who knew??

A lot has happened since then (Namibia was captured by South Africa during WWI and gained independence in 1990,) but German influence is still very strong. Go to Namibia and you'll see German architecture, German food... German is even one of the official languages (the other is English.)

So we reviewed how to say please and thank you in German (which I reminded the kids to many eye-rolls that I expected them to use at dinner,) and then watched this German numbers video on YouTube. 

(Putting the numbers to music is awesome for memory retention, by the way. I can count to 10 in Arabic as well as I can in English because of a camel-counting song I learned like 5 years ago.)

I put this German Picture Dictionary for Kids on the coffee table, and because my older kids are incorrigible bookworms who will read anything left within their reach (up to and including appliance user manuals,) I knew they'd pick it up and look at it.

My kids were thrilled that color names in German are pretty similar to their English counterparts.

Then they got some extra screen time to play around on some free online German game sites here and here. (The second is a little hard to navigate so you'll need to help them learn to use it.)

Wednesday

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised since German roots run deep in Namibia, but I didn't expect to find that Namibia is 90% Christian, and of those Christians, 50% are Lutheran. We took the opportunity to learn more about Martin Luther (who was German, incidentally.)

There's a 4.5-minute long National Geographic documentary on the Reformation here, but if you have teenagers who can stomach it I highly recommend this 2-hour PBS documentary. (I now know all there is to know about Martin Luther, and there's a lot more to the story than the highlights you learn in school.)

We also read I Am Lutheran and the kids wanted to know why there are so many names for what we call the sacrament: the Lord's Supper, holy communion, eucharist... I have no idea. There just are.

Thursday

The Namib Desert runs up and down the entire Atlantic coastline of Namibia, and the way the dunes come right up to the ocean is really incredible.

We read some information on the Namib desert in particular here, and checked out the book Sand Dunes by Peggy J. Parks. Despite its not-at-all riveting title, it was fascinating! It told us a lot we didn't know about the Namib, and after we finished the kids were all excited about looking up the things we read about.

We watched this awesome Smithsonian video on shovel-snouted lizards and this crazy video about the noises sand dunes make. It's almost too weird to be believed:


We watched more videos like this one and this one about the Skeleton Coast and this one about sandboarding in Namibia, and then this beautiful footage of a jeep expedition into the Namib:


Maybe it was the strings music in the background, but this video made me legitimately start tearing up at how beautiful the world is.

After reading the first page of Survival! Desert (a Time for Kids book) so the kids would be interested in picking it up on their own later, we moved to the porch with two trays full of flour and some drinking straws to practice forming our own sand dunes.

The older kids discovered it took time and patience to form a sand dune. The little kids (plus a toddler we were babysitting for the day) had a blast blowing around the flour and all ended up looking like Father Time.

Had zero idea what we were doing or why, but they were totally into it anyway.

If you do this at home, remember to reserve the honor of cleaning up afterward for the best-behaved child of the day or week, and let them blow it all off with a Shop-Vac set in reverse. They'll love it.

Friday

We watched a movie I found at the library called Magic Journey to Africa. Frankly, I've heard more coherent storylines when my kids insist on recounting their dreams in the morning, and the CGI and the acting was a solid D, but we saw the Namibian landscape and my 6-year-old liked the flying Pegasus.

For dinner I made cabbage and pap, which wasn't super-flavorful but not horrible, either. I really did want to like it, though, because it was soooooo easy.

Pap is the stuff in the center and is served with just about every meal in Namibia.

Traditionally, people eat pap directly from the communal dish with their right hands. (It figures that the one time I told my kids they could eat with their hands, none of them wanted to.)

At bedtime I read The 3 Little Dassies by Jan Brett. It's an African version of the three little pigs inspired by her trip to Namibia. Even if you don't know Jan Brett's name, you'd know her distinctive illustrative style when you saw it.

To be honest I wasn't sure we could fill up an entire week talking about a sparsely-populated country I knew nothing about, but I shouldn't have been worried because Namibia is a fascinating place and we barely scratched the surface. Now I know better.

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7 Quick Takes about Interesting Dog Breeds, Why I Didn't Major in Philosophy, and Summer Mode

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

—1—

I've been dying to take this boat tour near us where you learn all kinds of history and go through a canal lock and everything. After 4 or 5 years, I finally got it together and our family went this week!

It was a complete disaster.

It was supposed to be a 2-hour tour but the weather was turning stormy so they cut the tour short. I'm not exaggerating when I say the driver was booking it home just seconds ahead of some seriously ominous-looking thunderclouds. It started pouring rain just as we docked and boarded the trolley back to the visitor's center.

Then the driver slipped and fell on the wet ground and hurt his knee, so we all huddled there drenched with the rain blowing in until the ambulance came, listening to periodic thunder and the tour guide telling us to "stay inside the trolley and don't touch anything metal."

It was not exactly what I'd envisioned when I paid for the tickets. But at least it's a tour the kids will never forget.

—2—

While driving, I pulled up behind a car with a bumper sticker shaped like a dog bone that said "I ♥ My Morkie."

Pointing to the sticker, I asked my 14-year-old daughter in the passenger seat, "What do you think a 'Morkie' is a cross between?"

"Probably a monkey and an orca," she answered.

I had to ask.

—3—

I don't think I have the patience for philosophy. I took a course in college and while I liked it, thinking about it too hard made me want to run from the room screaming "IT'S ALL SEMANTICS! THERE IS NO RIGHT ANSWER!!!"

My 12-year-old, however, must not feel that way because she thinks about this kind of mind-bending stuff for fun. She randomly approached me and said, "If you're on the Internet and you read the statement 'Don't believe everything you read online,' there's no way to follow or not follow it."

Because if you believe that statement then you're not following it, but if you don't believe it then you're not following it either... except that you also are.

At that point I felt my brain turning into cotton candy and had to go change a poopy diaper just to bring myself back to reality.

—4—

I'm not sure what I did in my sleep to mess up my neck so badly, but I woke up one morning and could barely move. I shuffled into the living room, got a heating pad, and was lying corpse-like with it on the couch when Phillip limped in the front door.

He explained that he'd been out running and twisted his ankle, then grabbed a bag of frozen peas and retired to the bedroom to ice it.

As I contemplated the two of us lying down in our separate invalid states, it hit me: we're adults now. And getting old sucks.

—5—

My 2-year-old is allergic to mosquito bites. What is just an itchy annoyance for most people is, for him, a hard red golf-ball sized lump that sticks around for weeks. If it's anywhere near his eye, it swells up so big he can't even open it the next day.

So I think you'll understand if I'm kind of a psycho about putting bug spray on him every time he goes outside. If I'm not, he comes back in looking like the Elephant Man.

Apparently he's been watching and learning from my hysteria because when we were watching a movie in the basement and he heard a mosquito buzzing around, he ran to my side shrieking "Buggy bites!!!"

I was glad because then I tracked down the little sucker and killed it, but it also made me feel like the behavioral psychologist who did that unethical Little Albert experiment in the '20s.

—6—

This is a very busy time for Phillip, and aside from the day he took off for the disastrous boat tour, we haven't been seeing a whole lot of him.

He's been on three business trips this month, and he also has a new calling at church. (Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints don't have paid clergy at the local level, just rank-and-file people like ourselves who are asked to fill different church positions at different times in our lives.) Phillip was just called to be a counselor to the bishop, who is the leader of our congregation, and he's been pretty busy.

Which means I should probably get out the ladder, climb up to the eaves of the house, and spray that wasp's nest the size of my head, because who knows when he'll next have time to do that?

Many callings require sacrifices of time, and I'm alright with that. Intense callings at church mean you increase your reliance on the Lord out of necessity, and while it's not something we would've gone out and asked for, I think this calling is going to be a great thing for him and our family.

—7—

Our kids' last day of school wasn't until late June, and then we were on vacation from then until the 4th of July — so here it is, mid-July, and we've only been in Summer Mode for 2 weeks. 

But the other day I went in the dollar store for some goggles the kids will surely lose within 10 minutes (which is why I buy them at the dollar store) and spied an endcap of school supplies. Then the cross-country team had their first group run of the season. Nooooo! I'm not ready. Not at all.

This is all I want to think about right now.

Yesterday, I ate Cheetos on the beach, people. The thought of signing reading logs again makes me want to yack.

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Excerpts from a Toddler's Bucket List

Today I noticed my 2-year-old staring intently at nothing for several moments, and when I called his name the spell was broken: he leaped up, grabbed a spatula, and jumped in an empty diaper box making siren noises.

What do toddlers think about when they're lost in thought? I'll never be sure, but it's most likely composing their bucket lists.

And from what I can gather, this is what's on my 2-year-old's list of things to do before it's too late.

1. Dump out all of the things in all of the buckets.

2. Like a Whole 30, but where I wholly reject 30 foods I previously enjoyed.

3. Become fluent in my native language.

4. Finally catch the cat.

5. Get stuck in the soft play.

6. Meet Elmo.

7. Face my fear of the vacuum cleaner.

8. Watch the sun rise. Preferably on a morning when my parents have a chance to sleep in.

9. Live for a month on nothing but carbs.

10. Cry at Disneyland.

11. Reach the drawer with the scissors.

12. Stop shoving objects up my nose.

13. Build a tower that doesn't fall over or otherwise obey the laws of gravity.

14. Eat something soggy on the floor of the pool changing room.

15. Remain calm in a survival situation, such as getting stuck in my pant leg.

16. Flush something irreplaceable down the toilet.

17. Do it myself. All of it.

18. Talk to a therapist about my phobia of costumed figures, my phobia of strangers, and my PTSD from meeting Santa that one time.

19. Also seek professional help for my rock hoarding problem.

20. Hike Everest Be carried up Mount Everest.

21. Have a diaper blow-out at a Broadway musical.

22. Learn to say "no" in 50 different languages.

23. Bite a celebrity or famous person.

24. Push ALL of the elevator buttons. Especially the red one.

25. Drive a car that isn't foot-powered.

26. Write to Baby Einstein and tell him I've learned nothing.

27. Fall off something in all 50 states.

28. Have a temper tantrum in a tropical location.

29. Lose the fat rolls on my wrists and do some ab work to get rid of the milk belly.

30. Get Thomas the Train's autograph.

31. Sell my artwork on Etsy. (Mixed media but mostly scribbled-on library books and poop fingerpaintings.)

32. Graduate from an anger management class.

33. Eat at least one page from every title on the New York Times' Best Seller List.

34. Streak through a public space to raise awareness for an important cause. The cause is that I hate wearing clothes.

35. Refuse to play with a toy that was expensive and highly-rated on Amazon.

Once I think about all the things my 2-year-old is trying to cross off his bucket list, I guess it's understandable that he's so cranky sometimes. It's a lot to remember when you lack the necessary hand-eye coordination to write it down.

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The Educational Summer Vacation: Studying Sudan

This post includes my affiliate link, which means I may receive a commission on products you buy through these links. 

For the last 7 years, my kids and I have spent summer vacations visiting countries around the world (in our imaginations, guys, don't get excited.)

We use resources from the library and around the Internet, and it's a lot of work but also fun and a nice break from trips to the beach which are mostly just walking kids back and forth to the Port-a-Potty.

This year my kids decided to kick off the summer with Sudan, and needless to say they learned a lot. In fact, I learned a lot, because before this week I knew nothing.

Monday

The kids started off by locating Sudan on the map and completing the fill-in-the-blank passport pages I designed when this whole thing started. (Feel free to print them out here.)

The next thing to do was draw the flag and add it to the wall. Our map was printed pre-2011, when Sudan broke into Sudan and South Sudan, so for the sake of going with the map we already have, we decided to do the flags of both.

As we were designing and drawing, we listened to some Sudanese music I requested on interlibrary loan and read out loud these 57 Interesting Facts About Sudan. Did you know that Sudan actually has more pyramids than Egypt?

Tuesday

Christianity is the main religion of South Sudan, but since we are Christian and have also studied various Protestant and Catholic denominations while doing other countries, it's pretty familiar to us. So we focused today on the dominant religion of Sudan: Islam.

I checked out a copy of Mohammed by Demi, which is such a beautifully illustrated children's book about Islam's origins that I'm almost tempted to buy it. We also watched a Religions of the World video on Islam from Schlessinger Media that you and I may or may not have been forced to watch in middle school, which was dry but informative.

The kids have already learned about Islam during our studies of Libya, Oman, and Mauritania, plus we went to an open house at a mosque a few years back, so they're pretty familiar with the history and basic pillars of the Muslim faith.

This week we decided to focus on a Muslim holiday we didn't know much about, and since Eid al-Fitr was just last month (and we didn't even know how to pronounce it without Googling,) we figured that was a good one to start with.

After reading Rashad's Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr and Nabeel's New Pants: An Eid Tale, we talked about the ways people celebrate Eid and how we could do something similar at home.

We planned to wear our finest clothes to dinner at eat a full Sudanese meal, but I forgot we had youth activities at our church that night and we ended up eating a rushed meal of spaghetti and running out the door. (That's okay, it's the thought that counts.)

We did, however, make these Sudanese holiday cookies, gave gifts to each other (the kids drew each others' names and made a picture,) and pooled some money to donate to the poor through our church's humanitarian fund (which Muslims would call zakat.)

We used my 2-year-old's baby bottle to cut out the shapes.

Not very sweet, but the kids ate straight powdered sugar of their hands after dusting the cookies so they were satisfied.

The 6-year-old went nuts creating paintings for her brother, but I think mostly because she accidentally poured herself WAY too much paint and was trying to get rid of it.

For the record, Phillip was very incredulous that we were skipping Ramadan and going straight to celebrating Eid because that's missing the point, but we meant well. (Our purpose was obviously not to offend anybody, but to increase our understanding of and knowledge about world religions.)

Wednesday

I put on a Little Pim Arabic learning video, which my youngest watched while dreamily lying on the carpet wearing a firefighter's helmet.

We quickly reviewed Arabic numbers and how to say hello, goodbye, please, and thank you which we'd already learned in previous summers, and spent a few minutes on YouTube watching this alphabet song:


Even though it's just an alphabet song, it also conveyed the importance of the Quran and Mohammed to Islam which was a nice reinforcement of what we learned yesterday.

We never really tried to write in Arabic before because it looked so intimidating, but I found this chart online and had the kids trace the letters. I had them note that everything went from right to left, and tried to get them to follow the correct stroke order.

Everyone but the 2-year-old at least tried.

We attempted to learn color names with another YouTube video, and then we played Twister with this spinner and game board I'd stayed up way too late the night before doctoring with Arabic color names and just for fun, the Arabic words for 'hand' and 'foot.'

Unfortunately, the Arabic words for red, blue, yellow, and green all sounded too similar for us to tell apart, except for my 14-year-old who is sort of a foreign language wizard.

Thursday

Having an almost high-schooler has its benefits, because all I did today in terms of prep was say, "Hey, I want you to read this Wikipedia article and tell us about it over dinner, kay?"

My daughter didn't disappoint, and she taught us all about the decades of civil war in Sudan and the resulting peace treaty that created South Sudan as an independent country in 2011.

We then read Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan. I had no idea about this fascinating and heartbreaking piece of history. I wanted to watch the documentary Rebuilding Hope with the older kids (which we can get for free on Amazon Instant Video) but we ran out of time. Maybe another day this summer. (Caution: I haven't seen it or screened it for age appropriate-ness, so use your own judgement.)

That night for dinner I made ful medames, the national dish of Sudan. It was very pretty, but I must not have put enough salt in it because it definitely didn't taste as good as it looked.

I wasn't sure that the kids would be crazy about this fava bean-based dish anyway, but I served it with naan so I knew they'd at least eat something.

We have naan at our house all the time and they are willing to fight to the death for the leftovers.

Friday

We wrapped up our week in Sudan by touring a few of the interesting places in the country. We read about Suakin Island, where you can see the ruins of a once-beautiful port city on an oval-shaped island in the Red Sea that has been abandoned since the 1930s.

In this YouTube video, we visited some temple ruins and the Meroë pyramids in Sudan:


It was simultaneously very cool and very sad how those sites weren't protected or regulated by anyone. You could just walk right up to the pyramids and touch them, walk around in them... but some people abused that freedom and graffitied their names and all sorts of other dumb stuff right on the pyramids.

That gave us an opportunity to discuss the quote "With great power comes great responsibility," which comes from the great American philosopher Spider-Man. We talked about the importance of preserving beautiful places and treating them with respect, and then got a garbage bag and went to pick up trash on the side of the busy road near our house.

I'm sure it looked like I was out there with a chain gang of six, and by the end even my 2-year-old was pointing out cigarette butts for his siblings to pick up (not remembering what they were called, though, he called them "buttcracks.")

This week, I also left copies of the following books around the house knowing that my kids would pick them up and read them:

• A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park (my 6th grader just read it in school)
• Lost Girl Found by Leah Bassoff (also a juvenile book)
• The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney (YA)
• The Good Braider by Terry Farish (YA)
• A Hare in the Elephant's Trunk by Jan L. Coates (YA)

Who knew there were so many good chapter books to be found on Sudan??

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7 Quick Takes about Choosing Your Words, Some Grumbling Over Child Labor Laws, and the Agony of Losing Your Secret Peanut Butter Cookie Stash

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

—1—

You know that song on the radio that says "I'm a rebel just for kicks?" Here's a video clip of some random people I don't know dancing to it for reference:



Anyway, it came on the radio the other day and my 12-year-old asked, "What kind of a song is this? 'I'm disobedient and I break rules because I find it entertaining?'"

Her observation made me think of to the "archaic rap meme" I used to see on the Internet, my favorite of which was this one:

Feel free to chuckle silently into your sleeve if you get it.

—2—

My 6-year-old and I just finished reading the Great Illustrated Classics abridged version of Anne of Green Gables, so we decided to watch the 1985 movie.

Even though my 10-year-old was bored out of his gourd, he did stick around to yell "Make sure to check for ticks!" every time Anne went running through the tall grassy fields. We live in New England, obviously.

Anne was a cuter movie than I remembered, but what I did NOT remember was the male schoolteacher making googly eyes at Prissy Andrews the whole time. Come on, girl, #metoo that creepo so you can work on your penmanship without Chester the Molester drooling on your slate already!

—3—

I never stop being amused by visual representations of how many people are actually in our family.

Logically I know there are 8 of us, but I forget what that looks like until we pack up for a family bike ride and it seriously looks like the van is about to fall over.

One kid stayed home and the little kids' bike trailer was in the trunk.

This bike rack was a new purchase, and I was a little worried that the people at the factory hadn't thoroughly tested the "5-bike capacity" claim, thinking nobody would actually put that many on it.

Luckily it held, and we enjoyed a nice ride and some pretty views.

Taken just seconds before the toddler fell in. Just kidding. This time.

—4—

Our 14-year-old got a job this week, but first she has to fill out a bunch of paperwork to legally work in our state because she's a minor.

"This is ridiculous," I said, paging through the multi-page document outlining everything we had to do to secure my daughter's right to employment. "The 10-year-olds working in the textile mills in 1901 didn't have to do this."

Taking the papers back, my 14-year-old replied, "Mom, the 10-year-olds working in the textile mills are why we have to do this."

Oh. Right.

—5—

Thinking Putty is admittedly the coolest thing, but we just threw ours away because I'm fed up with finding it in the carpet, in people's hair, and on their clothes. The last straw was when we went to watch a movie and discovered a huge glob of Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty stuck to the couch cushions (technically it was more 'sat on' than 'discovered.')

I'm not a violent person, but in that moment I honestly wished Aaron was here so I could show him what crazy really looks like.

In the process of cleaning up the mess, my spray bottle of rubbing alcohol went missing. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it, and then my daughter mentioned she'd seen the 2-year-old with it.

Cue the panic attack, but bless his heart, he just picked it up and put it away. Not where I usually keep it (which is why I couldn't find it,) but he did place it under the sink with other similar-looking spray bottles and I have never been prouder of anyone.

—6—

Ever been busted hiding treats from your kids?

A friend brought us two plates of cookies, one chocolate and one peanut butter. I shared the chocolate ones with the kids but conveniently didn't mention the existence of the second plate, which I hid in the pantry behind an economy-sized container of quinoa.

I rationalized that (1) two of the kids are allergic to peanut butter anyway, and (2) peanut butter is my favorite. Mostly #2, if we're being honest.

Anyway, the next day when the kids saw her at a church activity she asked, "So which did you like better, the chocolate or the peanut butter?"

Ugh, I was this close to getting away with it, too.

—7—

Yesterday when we got to the pool, my younger kids weren't finished with their lunch so I told the others to go on ahead and we'd join them in a few minutes.

I still can't figure out how it can take 35 minutes to eat half an English muffin (that mystery will have to remain for another day,) but I did enjoy watching a familiar scenario play out in the car next to us: mom and daughter came out and while mom packed the trunk, the little girl got in the car and started messing around, climbing over the seats, bouncing up and down, looking in the cupholders, picking things up and playing with them... Warily, the mom looked up at her daughter playing with the driver's side head rest and sighed, "What do you think I want you to do right now?"

And as all kids are contractually obligated to do in that situation, the little girl acted as if she had no idea. Literally none. Like the concept of sitting down and buckling your seat belt when you get in a vehicle is so outlandish that no one would ever in a million years think to do it.

At least she didn't also have an English muffin that her mom was waiting for her to finish before 2024.

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