7 Quick Takes about Bug-Eyed People, Things Kids Say When You Serve Them a Green Smoothie, and the Pros and Cons of Having a House on the Waterfront

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

—1—

Kids are funny. When they figure out how to draw a new thing, they do it over and over dozens of times.

Currently, I'm finding these all over my house:

My 6-year-old says they're pictures of tanks.

In other artistic breakthroughs, my 3-year-old discovered how to draw people and is going wild with the concept.

Here's our family, and I didn't realize this before but apparently we're all just enormous heads with legs:

But we're happy about it.

—2—

So... what's going to happen when all the thrift stores open back up and people stampede in to donate the copious amounts of crap they've been clearing out of the basement for the last several months?

It's going to be like Black Friday in reverse.

We've done a ridiculous amount of spring cleaning this week. With the kids' help (some more enthusiastic than others) I've worked on decluttering the unsightly basement, raked the yard, spread some mulch, and vacuumed out the van.

I'm particularly excited about the van. Since I hardly drive it these days (and when I do, it's just for essential errands and the kids aren't invited,) it's actually going to stay clean this time!

We also spent a day removing the screens from the first floor windows and cleaning out the windowsills while the younger kids ran around in goggles and swimmies they found in the garage.

I'm not even sure what is happening here.

They seemed to have fun, the windows are clean, and the lawn is well-watered now.

—3—

A few years ago I made this, and it rang especially true this week:

This happened in the same day. For lunch I served the kids a green smoothie, and when the 3-year-old came to the table he asked 100% earnestly, "Is this poisonous?"

For dinner, I made a different kind of stir fry and when a few people said they liked it, I looked over and noticed that the 3-year-old was making a sour face and silently giving a double thumbs-down. Not saying anything or making a show of it at all, just putting his opinion out there.

(I should say that last summer we made a list of table manners to follow, which we still take out to review sometimes, and one of them is "No complaining about the food." But I guess non-verbal complaints are kind of a gray area we'll have to address later.)

—4—

The driveway in front of our garage is the lowest point of our entire yard. FYI, this is not a good quality in a driveway.

As a result of gravity there's almost always a small puddle there, but during the rainy spring months, the puddle sometimes stretches to the entire width of the two-car driveway and more closely resembles a pond. If we have company over, they have to swim to the front door.

Anyway, my kindergartner was assigned to make a Venn diagram of things you'd see in towns versus cities, and I had to laugh when for "towns" he drew a house with a ginormous puddle in front.

It's not all bad, though. The puddle/river/pond in our driveway has provided endless hours of quarantine fun for my kids.

The 8-year-old has been experimenting with making boats out of leaves, sticks, and bark to sail across it.

Behold the armada.

The 3-year-old was less successful. He might have been copying something another sibling said, but I heard him happily yelling, "Mine is the Titanic!"

I'll never let go, Jack.

—5—

Every night after dinner, each kid gets a kitchen cleaning chore. We used to write the different jobs that need to be done on popsicle sticks and draw lots, but we kept losing the sticks and since my 11-year-old likes programming, he made a random chore picker on the computer that works a lot better.

He's always tinkering with the chore picker, adding new backgrounds, music, or fancy effects. This time he recorded new background music: his voice bellowing "DO YOUR CHORE!!!" on continuous loop.

When he ran the chore picker after dinner and the new soundtrack started going, I started laughing, and then the other kids started laughing. After a while, my 11-year-old started getting annoyed that everyone was just standing there laughing and tried to redirect everyone: "Guys. GUYS! Do your chores! Stop guys, DO YOUR CHORES!"

At that point, I was laughing so hard I couldn't even talk. He was yelling "do your chore" over the sound of his own voice yelling "do your chore" and that's basically parenthood.

He's going to be a great dad someday.

—6—

There's a trail leading through the woods behind our house that lets out onto a dirt road, so I decided to take a walk along it with my kids.

My 6-year-old soon said he had to pee, and since it's a dead-end dirt road with about three houses on it and there's never any traffic, I told him to go ahead and do his business. I didn't think it was necessary to take him deep into the woods or hide behind a tree for privacy because, like I said, there's never anyone on that road.

As I'm sure you can guess, a man in a pickup truck rolled by at that precise moment and gave us a friendly wave. It was slightly embarrassing, but I've lived through worse.

Seeing his brother, my 3-year-old suddenly remembered that he had to pee, too. Just as he pulled his pants down and started watering the local flora, a second car drove by. What. Are. The odds.

I'm sure I will never again see a car on that road as long as I live.

—7—

My kids have been a little bored lately, mostly due to the obscenely rainy and dreary weather, and have been rediscovering old favorite YouTube videos from years ago.

I hope you enjoy this hilarious video as much as I did, both the first time around and the second:


Have a good weekend, and stay healthy!

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