7 Quick Takes about Pull-Up Disclaimers, Products Not Intended for Your Hair, and Finding Your Spirit Animal at the Natural History Museum

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

—1—

A few weeks ago, another mom from church said she was giving away some leftover Pull-ups. I volunteered to take them off her hands, made arrangements to pick them up, then forgot all about it because life.

At least she remembered, though, and I walked into church on Sunday to see this sitting on the counter:

On a related note: if you're in my ward (congregation) and saw this on Sunday, I feel like I need to clarify that the Pull-ups aren't literally for me.

Since the note was slightly ambiguous, I'd just like you to know they will be worn by children.

—2—

My dad is visiting us for our spring break, and we've been doing a lot of fun things. The weather has been kind of disappointing, but on the days that are less rainy we've been trying to get outside.

We took this beautiful walk:

and laughed at this "pick up after your dog" sign in the parking lot:

It's true.

Trust me, if there was a poop fairy I'd know. Over the last 14 years of having small children, I've dealt with and disposed of an astronomical amount of scat.

So actually... maybe there is a poop fairy after all, and it's me.

—3—

My 2-year-old's hair was getting long, so I got out our scissors and asked him to go get the spray bottle of water from the bathroom to wet down his hair.

Something you probably need to know for this story is that our spray bottle looks like this:

Anyway, my 2-year-old was gone for a while so I figured he got distracted on the way. "Can you see the spray bottle?" I yelled.

"Uh... the green one?" he yelled back.

"Yes!"

A few minutes later, he came down and handed me this, even though you could tell he knew that it wasn't quite right. But it was green. And it sprayed. And it was a bottle.

No wonder he was confused.

—4—

As one of our Easter traditions, we colored eggs this week. But we are kind of done with the lame kits from CVS and started doing something called pysanky.

Pysanky is a method of layering wax-resist designs on eggs to create colorful and intricate designs, which we've done ever since we learned about Ukraine in our educational summer vacation.

We figured that it's different and fun, and besides, when a project involves children handling unwashable dye and melting wax over an open flame, what could possibly go wrong??

Of course, our finished eggs look nothing like real pysanky and I'm probably offending the entire country of Ukraine by saying this, but we had fun and I'm proud of how they turned out.

It looks like you know what you're doing when you display your finished work on a stand.

Traditional psyanky are almost always geometrical designs, but that doesn't mean much to my kids.

You can see in the picture above how my 7-year-old made a scene with clouds and grass and sky, which is kind of hard to do since you have to think in reverse to get the colors right when you're using wax-resist.

My 14-year-old made hers into a globe, because she likes geography.

And my 12-year-old, the violinist, made sheet music:

It seems like every time we get a little better at it, so we all look forward to doing pysanky every year. What fun Easter traditions do you guys have?

—5—

We were checking out books at the library, and my 2-year-old handed me this.

I went to put it in the bag but glanced at it and oh my gosh! Who did this to this book??

Indignantly, I opened it to look inside and saw this note from the librarians on the first page.

The children's librarian, who saw me staring at the book, said "We had so many people bringing it to the front desk and reporting it as vandalized we had to add that."

It just looks really real.

—6—

I've discovered the beauty of industrial products for residential use. When we realized we needed to get a mat to protect our wood floors from the wheels of the rolling chair at the computer desk, we first bought one of those flimsy little clear plastic mats.

Which never stayed in place and quickly got dirty and nasty-looking, and was basically a waste of money.

So then we decided to replace it with an industrial entry rug, the kind designed for office buildings and banks. After a month it still looks brand-new, which makes sense. Regular stuff falls apart so fast at my house, but this is meant to be walked on a million times a day and vacuumed at least daily.

From now on I have to remember that if it's not hardy enough for a school or prison, it's probably not going to cut it here, either.

—7—

Another thing we've been doing with my dad is going to lots of museums (again, because the weather is not great.)

We've played at science museums,

Checked out fine art (parenting tip: you can enjoy the paintings better if one adult waits outside with the little kids so they don't shatter a 17th century vase or ruin everyone else's visit by running through the Greek room yelling "Eww! EWWW!" at all the nude statues,)

Laughed at the natural history museum's attempt to "be hip and speak the kids' language" in the geology room (although when I showed this to my kids they started walking around looking for these Minecraft minerals so it totally worked,)

And when we were separately exploring the taxidermied animals on display in the mammal room, I received a text from my daughter saying that she'd found our new family mascot:

I'll see if I can add it to the Evans family crest cross-stitch I've been working on.

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