7 Quick Takes about Toddlers Who Always Tell the Truth, Mutant Cacti, and Why You Shouldn't Text Me Anything Important

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

—1—

On Tuesdays, my daughter goes to her teacher's house for a lesson. If the teacher's kids need extra attention, I play with them so the lesson can continue uninterrupted.

The toddler is starting to talk more now so things are getting hilarious. This week she was standing on a chair yelling "I tall!" so I told her "Yes, you are. How did you get so tall? From eating all of your veggies?"

She frowned and said, "No I don't yike veggies. I yike potato chips. Veggies are gwoss."

Kids, man. They tell it like it is.

—2—

My homeschooling experience is certainly not typical (only homeschooling one child at a time, for one year at a time, in 11th grade) but so far I think it's going really well with daughter #2.

I think she's absorbing information better and stressing less, plus I get to enjoy her company during the day and learn new things. 

Just from overhearing bits of her cooking class over the last two weeks, I've learned a better way to hold a knife and a more efficient method for cutting up peppers, pineapples, and avocados. Plus, she's made us pasticho (Venezuelan lasagne,) Challah bread, and tapioca pudding that tasted like ice cream.

I can honestly say I didn't anticipate these benefits when she first told me she wanted to homeschool.

—3—

My 16-year-old was laughing at something she saw on the Internet and showed it to me: 

Yes, you read it right. That LED highway sign says "Hey teens buckling up is totes yeet yo."

I didn't think it was real but I looked it up and it was an actual campaign by the Utah Department of Transportation in 2019. 

I'm not sure that particular attempt to be hip with the kids worked, but I give it a B+ for effort and good intentions.

"It doesn't even make sense," my 16-year-old complained. "If anything, it should say 'Seatbelts: stay seated, not yeeted.'"

—4—

There's this museum near us where I took the kids a bunch of times when they were younger and it apparently gave them PTSD, because whenever I mention the name of it now they all break out in hives and start screaming "No! Anywhere but there!" 

Because of their allergy to this place we've avoided it for so long that my youngest kid has never even been there, so on Monday when everyone was home for the holiday I decided that the older partypoopers could stay home and and I would take the little kids to the museum.

We had a lovely time and that night when I was putting them to bed the 6-year-old whispered in my ear "The museum was fun."

I felt a little validated by that, honestly. It is a fun museum. Some people are just wet blankets.

—5—

I'm not a plant person, but when the pandemic hit in 2020 and my husband started working from home a lot, we set up a little office space for him including some potted plants.

On the plus side, I haven't managed to kill them yet. On the other hand, they're kind of demented-looking.

This cactus in his pot of succulents started out as a cute-looking little guy, but as he's grown it's looking more and more like a case of demonic possession.

Is there anything we could've done to prevent this? We don't know.

We also had a trailing ivy plant that was looking beautiful, but when we went on summer vacation last year I put it on the porch to get water from the rain and the sun burnt it to a crisp. 

Ever since then I've been nursing the sickly-looking remnants, and recently even took a couple of cuttings so I eventually fill the empty spaces left in the pot from the shoots that didn't make it. 

Sprouting roots now! So maybe I'll be able to transplant them back into the pot soon.

—6—

Ever since I got my new phone a few months ago, I've been having a big problem with it. Every once in a while, it will randomly stop receiving incoming texts. Of course, it won't tell me that, so I'll only realize it after several days, and then after I restart my phone I get all 50 missed texts.

The worst is the time-sensitive ones I feel terrible to have missed, like a 2-day old text from a friend that says "Help! I'm running late and was wondering if you can pick up my son for me?!?" 

Recently I told a friend to text me if she wanted me to give her daughter a ride home from orchestra, and she did text me but I didn't get it so I assumed her daughter wasn't coming, and I showed up in my husband's small commuter car with a bunch of stuff including two giant cornhole boards taking up the entire backseat so there was no room for her. (We ended up folding down the seats, shoving the boards into the trunk, and having my daughter perch illegally on top of them for the 40-minute ride home.)

It's often embarrassing and always annoying. Has anyone else ever had a problem like that with a Galaxy phone??

—7—

However, I'm still getting spam texts on my phone including this one. 

I know you should never respond to these, but I still think it would be fun to text back in the voice of this wholesome-sounding Jeff character with his cozy family-run coffeehouse. 

I'm just going to imagine that this Jeff person is real, and if you end up getting the same text from the same spammer in the San Fernando Valley blasting out a million of these, don't ruin it for me. I don't want to know.

Click to Share: