Be Careful What You Wish For

Before our kids were born, or even when they were little babies, I liked to dream about all the wonderful qualities I hoped they'd have as children. Now that some of those wishes have come to fruition, I'm forced to consider that I maybe didn't think things through as thoroughly as I should have.

For instance, I hoped that our kids would love words; that they would love to read and to find out the meaning of words and would get as excited as their father does about where different words come from. I had not considered that this might mean that my children would have their own ideas about what books to like, and that I might have to suffer through hundreds of readings of our vast library of books on construction equipment, cars, farm animals, dinosaurs, princesses, and Disney fairies (let me just pause here to highly DISrecommend the tome The Fairy Berry Bake-Off).

I also must have forgotten about that joyous phase of every kid's life, where totally inappropriate or even slightly taboo words are the best ones EVER. This weekend, while riding in the car to the store with me, Daniel said, "Mom? You know what word I love?" Just as my pulse started to race at the thrill of my child having a favorite word, he concluded, "Butt." (pause of silence) "BUTT!" (only this time in that gooky voice that comes from talking through an emerging laugh). This is, unfortunately, the favorite word of both our children at this time, and the source of frequent entertainment and merriment in our home. Yesterday for Valentine's Day Kyle and I worked it into our good-morning conversation when we woke Daniel up for school, just to show him we love him.

I'd also hoped that our kids would be creative, which in Daniel's case seems to be playing itself out in the form of some outlandish storytelling. The other day when I picked him up from school, his teacher asked, "You don't actually have, like, 100 chickens on your property, do you?" When I reported that, no, we do not in fact raise chickens at all, she said she thought we didn't, but that Daniel had told her we were raising them in order to make lots of chicken pot pies. And while this particular story might have been a slightly altered version of the plot to Chicken Run, this is not the first time Daniel's teacher has had to seek a little reality-check at pickup time. In the imaginary pets department alone, I've previously corrected stories about us owning a rabbit and some chameleons.

Additionally, at lunch the other day we had some Bugles chips. I told the kids that they had to finish all their carrots before they could have chips, and this was no problem for Daniel. He did do this, of course:


...but who can blame him? I think this is a requisite childhood Bugle behavior.

The real winner in the creativity department this day, though, was Eva. She showed me a carrot-less plate, received and ate her Bugles, and then went down for a nap. Upon cleaning the kitchen, I started to dump out her nearly-empty milk cup and noticed two baby carrots, perfectly concealed under the last inch of milk. Drat! Outsmarted by a two-year old!

Finally, we are at last within sight of that blessed event: the end of diapers. I have been dreaming of the day when we can quit buying and changing diapers, and have been anxiously awaiting Eva's learning to use the toilet. Yesterday morning by 8:15, however, I noticed that we were on our seventh potty trip of the day already. It took me an hour to change sheets around our house, because I had to stop every two minutes to help with wiping and hand-washing and such. Similarly, I spent much of our trip to the library on Friday in the bathroom with Eva, and she's used potty breaks as her excuse to get out of bed twice during today's nap time. At this rate, I won't be able to finish this blog post and make our grocery list before nap time is finished.

So far, our grocery list only consists of our weekly 3 gallons of milk and 5-lb box of oranges. I guess that's what I get for wishing for kids who are healthy eaters.