This may come as a shock to readers, but my two-year-old is not fond of napping. When I announced naptime, he hid behind the Curtain of Invisibility.
Nov6
Category Archives: Funny parenting stories
Oct28
It’s simple mathematics, really.
To prove their love and devotion, my kids will often let me sleep with stuffed animals carefully chosen from among their vast stores.
It’s a little like paying tribute but without the volcano. One daughter will even hold out the proffered gift, head bowed, and back away, still bent at the waist, arms out. She’s a silly one. I don’t know where she gets it.
Lately the girls have been on a rabbit kick, so the space between Husband’s and my pillows has become filled with Thumper, Hopper, Flopper, and friends.
Five stuffed rabbits, one bear, and one Alf in an apron and chef’s hat.
Husband said, “Why do there seem to be more animals here instead of less?” Read the rest of this entry
Oct15
Catlish
On our walks to the mailbox, the neighbor’s cat, Callie, comes out to greet us with a meow. I respond in kind.
Callie the Kitty
Callie often accompanies us the rest of the way to the mailbox, but today, she stopped short.
“You coming, Kitty?” Joe asked.
She merely looked at him.
“Mom, ask Kitty if coming,” he said in his sweet two-year-old way.
And because I speak Cat. Obviously.
What’s a mom to do? I turned to Callie and said, “Meow. Meow. Meow meow?”
Here was her response: Read the rest of this entry
Sep19
Mom, look what I can do!
Joe called me into his room after I’d put him to bed last night, asking for a drink of water.
Classic stall technique.
He also held up his finger and said, “Get rid of it.”
As it was dark, I fumbled to find the end of his finger, where, what I thought was a broken fingernail, was hanging off. I easily removed it and tried to throw it in the trash, but as it took several tries to scrape the sticky substance off my own finger, I asked,
“Is this a booger? From your nose?”
Though I couldn’t see his beaming face, I could hear it in his voice.
“I got it myself!”
The last time I removed a booger from his nose, I had to wrestle him into the corner of the couch and use the jaws of life to pry his hands away from his face. (How is a two-year-old so strong?!)
So I said, “That’s good I guess.”
As I left his room, thinking maybe I won’t have to struggle to evacuate his nostrils again, it occurred to me that I had effectively taught my son to pick his nose.
Yep. *I* did that.
Sigh.
Aug19
The toddler and the baby
Little Joe was so sweetly and lovingly holding a baby doll, hugging and kissing it, I thought, “Awh, he’ll make a good dad some day, or perhaps big brother.”
Then he banged the doll’s head on the ground and yelled, “Ow!” Not once or twice, but three times.
Nice, baby. Niiiice. A few seconds before “Wham! Wham!”
Boys.
Jul28
Kids grow up so fast.
One day my son is two. The next day he eats cold pizza for breakfast, so apparently he’s now in college. [My husband was on breakfast duty that day.]
My husband was googling what to do when your paint cans won’t close securely, so I asked him, “How did we find things out before Google?” He said, “We talked to people. This is much better.” Read the rest of this entry
Jun25
It’s not what you think. I can explain.
Some time after the kids had been playing outside my bedroom window, I walked into my room, looked out the window, and saw something that made me freeze, back up slowly, and call down the hallway, “Girls? Could you come here a moment?”
Then, pointing, “What. Is that?” Read the rest of this entry
Jun17
My brilliant son
Joe pointed to my husband’s shirt hanging up on the clothes rack and said, “Dada.”
“That’s right, Joe. That’s Dada’s.”
Then he pointed to my husband’s sock and said, “Dada.”
Me, thoroughly impressed: “Yes, Dada’s.”
Then he pointed to Read the rest of this entry
Dec12
The winner of The Great American Bake Off is… Part 3
(If you missed them, here are parts one and two.)
When you were last with our heroine, I’d just discovered that I had refrozen my pumpkin puree for the pie I was supposed to take to Thanksgiving lunch that day. I had no choice but to grab another bag from the freezer and toss it in a bowl of warm water to hopefully thaw in time.
Recall that I had proudly announced to my husband that there would be no last-minute dash to the grocery store, as I had remembered, for the first time ever, that I needed evaporated milk for this recipe and so had bought it in advance.
While waiting on the puree, I started to make the pumpkin pie crust, by hand this time, when I stopped to put Joe down for a nap. I asked my husband to step in. When I came back, my husband was gone. On the counter was our near-empty tub of Crisco. Read the rest of this entry
Dec7
The winner of The Great American Bake Off is… Part 2
Now that my husband and three daughters are at a Christmas pageant, and I have the wonderful excuse of staying home with a sleeping baby boy, I can give you Part 2! (If you missed part 1, you can find it here.)
Backing up a bit, since my laughing mother kindly reminded me that I forgot this tidbit: The night before Thanksgiving, the girls and I made pumpkin bread to have for breakfast Thanksgiving morning. Baking with the girls is stressful. They are adamant about having an equal amount of tasks to do.
“You crack the egg, then I’ll put it in, and she can break it with the spoon.”
“We need one and half cups of flour, so how about we each do a half cup?”
“You hold the measuring cup while I pour and she stirs it in.”
I kid you not. And four people crowding around the counter (me to supervise) is a mess. It didn’t help that we were pushing up against bedtime, so I was trying to hurry.
With these girls, hurrying is not in their vocabulary. That preheat oven step needs to come, like, 7th next time, because the oven was ready to go looooong before the batter was in the bread pan.
To make matters worse, my thawed pre-packaged bag of mashed pumpkin wasn’t quite enough, so I had to borrow from the bag for the next day’s pie–an issue I’d sort out later, darn it, just get the bread in the oven already!
Finally, the oven door shut and the girls were scooted off to bed, with the torturous smell of baking pumpkin bread wafting down the hallway.
The next morning, as we enjoyed our delicious bread, I searched for the bags of pumpkin I needed for my pie. They were nowhere in the fridge. I checked the counter, the sink? Nada. Read the rest of this entry
Writing and Martial Arts 