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initiative & love
I don’t know if we switched up his dog food or if he just had some freakish gut issue for a day or two, but last week our boy Ryder had some serious doggie diarrhea. (You know, I’ve written about kid poop and vomit and all the kinds of disgusting, why not dog diarrhea – eh?) It was so bad that my Google history will reveal some pretty bizarre searches on how to ease all of our suffering over here. At any rate, I think it was a day when everything was already kind of chaotic and when we walked into our home and smelled the horrific dog poop scent…
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lessons learned
Yesterday I volunteered at the kids’ homeschool co-op. I was a helper in Bergen’s first grade class. 18 first graders. One very rainy day. No outside play time. This is what I learned. Surprisingly, I really like a large group of first graders. They were funny, unpretentious, happy and kind. Clorox wipes remove magic marker stains from school tables. Super grateful for this when Boy in the Orange Shirt decided to color his two-inch Russian nesting doll with eight markers crammed into his fist at once. A six-year-old can almost run faster than me. We played race games in the gym at recess. I wasn’t letting her win. I was…
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Don’t Leave The Path.
Can I just tell you a little story about poop? (I mean, it’s not as if I have never done that before – right?) Last Friday our home school Suburban headed to Pisgah Forest in North Carolina for a Stream Investigations Class. The class was great. The water was cold. I dressed the kids in matching tie-dyed Look Up Lodge shirts so that I could easily spot their wayward selves among the thirty other children. I am not normally a children-match-one-another kind of mom. But it worked out pretty perfectly, actually. Otto Fox stayed strapped to my back in his carrier most of the day. Sometimes he was happy about…
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More Evidence
I keep telling you how funny I think my youngest daughter is. And, like everyone in the ten and under crowd, her humor can sometimes veer to the potty variety. (Which, I guess, implies that mine can too, since I am finding these comments humorous.) So. With that said. Here’s the latest. Walking around the house, making a funny face and a slurping noise, Finn declares, “My spit tastes …. ummmm …. pretty good.” After watching her poop disappear down the toilet, she commented, “Aww. That little one doesn’t know where his family is.”
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Oh. And This Happened Too.
If you don’t care for reading about poop or vomit or throw up, you should probably read another blog. A tidier, cleaner, more appropriate blog perhaps. I can’t exactly help this. I have six kids – remember? This is what I do right now. Here goes . . . They needed a bath. It was a tub mostly full of pudgy kid legs and dirty toes and stubby fingers and plastic tug boats. Beckett, Otto Fox and Piper Finn were all getting a cleansing soak. Things seemed pretty fine. Rinse hair. Wash face. Reach for baby shampoo. Turn back to tub. What in the world? Who dumped a small bucket…
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Days Like These
Days. We all have ’em – right? Here’s the ups and downs of yesterday at this house. (I think I’ll put a Pollyanna spin on my day. Just for kicks, you know. Remember Pollyanna? That kid in an old movie who changes a whole town with her upbeat, optimistic attitude? She takes horrible aspects of her life and spins them with sticky-sweet cheerfulness.) I woke up super sleepy (I blame this on late night Survivor watching) and I decided that sleeping an extra half hour was a better use of my time than a shower. So my hair looked rowdy today. It sort of surprised me every time I…
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I Wish This Was More Unusual Than It Sounds
As Piper was just heading to her nap, she said, “I poo on little people.” I sort of laughed. Because it sounded funny, okay? And then, because I wanted to move on to my next task, I said something like, “Oh, okay. Sleep well, Little Willow.” And she said, “I poo on little people.” Insistent – eh? Not satisfied with my response? Alright Piper. “Oh. Well, Piper. Don’t poo on little people.” And then she pointed to a basket on her floor. Full of Fisher-Price Little People. Uh-oh. Now things were beginning to make more sense. Unfortunately. The Little People victim was not hard to spot. The brown smear across…
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Poop and Potential
Every morning it is my privilege to enter little Willow’s room to give her a good morning kiss and hug and to see her sleepy, sweet eyes light up when I enter the room. And nearly every morning the same smell and the same words greet me as I enter her domain. “Poo Poo,” she declares, pointing to her itsy bum. And the smell pervading the room affirms her assertion. For some reason this morning, I was talking Baby Smack to her as I changed her diaper for the eleventy-billionth time. Now, Baby Smack by its very nature does not need to make sense, and so it frequently does not.…
