Sunday Share: Y2W18

It’s Sunday. It’s raining. I’m trying to make the boys clean, but I’d have better luck trying to teach Chinese Calculus to a barrel of monkeys. It’s their own mess, too.

The peppers are coming along nicely in the living room. As is the maple tree. We have carrots, cucumber, beans, peas, and lettuce seeds anxiously waiting to be planted in the garden. We just need to get past the last frost which is somewhere between now and May 21st. I’ll probably plant them next week and keep them covered.

Until then, here’s something to read…

Passing Down the Love
Backyard games for kids or adults who want to be kids again…

Dorky Mom Doodles
10 Hilarious status updates…

A Momma’s View
W is for what she really needed…

Old House In the Shires
Teens and their stupid parents…

Where Are Your Pants
Things she’ll never be heard saying…

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Y is for…

Our youth.

Once we have our own offspring to look after we realize we’re not as young as we used to be. Oh sure, we can keep up with the young’ns easy enough. But as the years past, so does our youthfulness. Our muscles need more and more time to recover after playing. We feel like we need more sleep. Hangovers last just a bit longer, too. You know you’re getting older when your aches and pains can predict the weather. Try as we may to hold on to those glory days, they will pass us by. Eventually our glory days fade into  golden years. Right now, I’m somewhere in between.

But it’s our youth that keep us young. Those heathens of ours will need to be entertained at some point. For me, that means 100+ pitches while they practice batting. It means playing catcher while they practice pitching. It means jumping on the trampoline so they can get launched. It means that when I go for a run they will want to ride their bikes and I may have to give them a push up a hill. It means lacing up my skates and hitting the ice with them. Now that I’m over 40, my body doesn’t recover like it used to. But if it weren’t for the youths in this household I wouldn’t be nearly as active as I am.

They keep me young, until I feel old.

W is for Questions…

WTH? I yelled to you 3 times. Selective hearing much?

WTF? Could you find a more annoying song? Seriously, DO NOT listen to Numnumnum (link to lyric video in case you wanted to know the words). WTF (*why*) he insists on playing it our Alexas is beyond me. I unplugged one of them so he couldn’t play it. What’s the most annoying song your kids make you listen to?

But this is Thursday and Thursdays are for questions. What, where, why, and when all begin with W. So let’s stop wasting time talking about the letter of the day and lets ask some questions.

1. Why are bees so important?

Crash: Because they pollinate the flowers and the flowers need to be pollinated to make more flowers and without flowers we couldn’t go to weddings.
Bang: Because they make nectar and honey for you

2. Where was Jesus born?

Crash: Jerusalem
Bang: In the stable

3. What is the largest mammal on Earth?

Crash: Elephant is the largest on land and largest anywhere is a blue whale
Bang: The dad grown-up black bear

4. Are there aliens somewhere in the universe?

Crash: Depends, right now we don’t know, but possibly.
Bang: No

5. If I gave you $20, what would you do with it?

Crash: Buy a $15 Google Play gift card and donate the rest to a charity.
Bang: Save it to buy a puppy

6. If you had your own museum, what would you put in it?

Crash: The history of video games.
Bang: It would be an animal museum – black bear bones, polar bear body, and an elephant skeleton in sections

7. If you had to buy yourself a gift that you couldn’t open for 5 years, what would you buy?

Crash: A car if I was old enough to drive, but I’m not. So I’d get the biggest TV I could
Bang: a baby bird in a box with holes for me to give it water and food

8. What would be something fun to fill a pool with to jump into?

Crash: A strawberry banana smoothie
Bang: corn starch water (to make nonnutonian fluid to walk on top of)

9. If you gave our family trophies, what would each of us get?

Crash: Me- for the best gamer, Bang- for being the most annoying, Dad- the best cooker and chore doer, Mom- for the best lover
Bang: Dad- bronze trophy for coming in 3rd in the car race, Mom- for coming in second in an ice cream eating race, Crash: For finishing his supper first, Me – for Gold, silver, and bronze for having the best questions in the world

10. Did you have any dreams last night?

Crash: As a matter of fact yes I did. There was a big Pokemon battle and I had Kyoger and the other guy had Groudon. Since one was fire type and one was water type, mine formed a big bubble and splashed it on Groudon. Then he was all wet, but it all evaporated off him then rained on him and evaporated and rained on him again, and so on. And it took all his energy away making the bubble evaporate.
Bang: No. I stayed awake all night.

V is for…

So many words begin with v
vacuum, valor, vanity…
V shall be for vamonos.
for kids that goes and goes goes.
Vamonos, the kids are awake
Vamonos, no time for a break.
Let’s go let’s go let’s go!
Life with kids is never slow…

U is for…

Undivided. In it’s entirety. Whole. As parents it’s easy to understand why our children may not receive our undivided attention. Laundry. Cooking. Assembling trampolines (that what we did after school today). A phone call. We’re sitting on the toilet. However, when our children finally have our undivided attention, there’s no telling what might happen. Perhaps they’ll want to play a board game. Perhaps they’ll tell us what they did in school. Perhaps they’ll just want to tell us a story. Usually, they’ll have some piece of useless information they found out about whatever video game, or Pokemon they’re obsessing over. We’ll feign interest so they know that what they have to say is important to us no matter how mundane. When a kid hands you a toy phone you answer it. It’s the same with their stories. Sometimes the best thing we can give them is our time. After all, it’s the one thing that once we give we never get back.

Unconditional. Our children’s love comes with no strings attached. Our love for our children is nonnegotiable. From the time we find out we’re expecting to the first moment we hold them in our arms, our love grows exponentially.

Of course we’re going to have tough days, tough weeks. Perhaps some tough years, too. We don’t love them less. They are our children. Learning. Growing. There’s bound to be mistakes by child and parent alike. We pick each other up, dust each other off, apologize and move on. We continue to feed them, shelter them, love them. No matter how much we’d like to hang them from the clothesline for a few hours.

T is for…

Considering I just fell asleep for a half hour while laying with the youngest, T is for tired. Isn’t that a parent’s mantra from the day (or before that) our kids are born? Sleep becomes a thing of the past. We’d trade a good night’s sleep for pretty much anything short of our first born. Tired of the daily grind to keep the urchins alive. Possibly tired of the arguing and the cooking and the cleaning. But we’re not allowed to be because this is what we signed up for when we had the heathens in the first place. It was in the fine print of the user agreement. Who reads those things, anyway?

Tired we may be, but we are also tough. Able to function, albeit barely, on just a few hours. Why do people say they slept like a baby? They woke every two hours to eat and pee? I think sleeping like a Daddy would be a much better comparison. So we tough it out, half asleep. We get the kids where they need to go. We feed them so they aren’t hangry. We clean them so we aren’t judged as poor parents. We teach them to say please and thank you and how to do long division. We are also tough to take their constant barrage of questions, stories, and brutal truths.

T is for the things we teach.

T is for turning off our devices and tuning into our children.

T is for time together. What’s family if we aren’t together? There will be days when our time together is limited by extracurricular activities. Music. Sports. All the the other places they need to be other than at home. Lately, Bang has really been into board games. Checkers. Life. Monopoly Gamer. It’s also a great way to give him the attention he wants while actively engaging him. We are very much a family oriented family. If there is something we can do together, we do it. We take hikes, whether s’mores are involved or not. We attend church. We go to the beach. We go camping.

Our time together is also limited. One day they won’t be so little. One day we won’t have so much time with them. Unless they decide to live at home until they’re 50 or we live like the Waltons, they won’t be home forever.

Sunday Share: Y2W17

Had I been thinking I would have made S for Sunday. Thinking isn’t one of my strong suits.

Another week has come to an end. Another week is about to begin. Now I’m gonna high five you as you run to me. Then I’ll give ya hearty butt slap on your way by. You got this week… Let’s do it.

Monster In Your Closet
Learning to love everyone…

Smorgasbord – Variety is the Spice of Life
On good bad guys…

Sounds Like Life to Me
Things to stop doing this year…

Second Wind Leisure
On sunrises and sunsets…

Mom of Two Little Girls
On not minding other’s business

R and S are for Go Ask Your Father…

There’s a twofer going on tonight. However, it’s only one post.

is for research. I can answer the boys questions without Google. What I can’t do is answer them thoroughly. If you can’t explain it simply enough for a 6 year old to understand you don’t understand it well enough. So I turn to Google to refine and finish my explanations. I know that’s not official research, but it’s good enough for now. As long as I use trustworthy sites.

Since I love their questions, I pray they continue to ask questions their entire life. Learning is essential and questions are proof they are trying. S is for students. Students of education. Students of life. Students for life.

 

1. What is cholesterol?

I had to admit defeat on this one. All I could them them is that it’s stuff in our blood and there two kinds, a good kind and a bad kind. Now I know the bad kind is LDL – low density lipoprotein. It’s sticky and is the stuff that clings to artery walls, reducing blood flow to the heart, and causes heart attacks. The only thing that can stop a bad cholesterol with a gun is a good cholesterol with gun. HDL – high density lipoprotein strolls the blood stream looking for LDLs. Once it finds it, it latches on and delivers the baddie to the liver (the judge who sentences the baddie to jail). The liver then filters it as a waste product and removes it from your body all together.

2. What is it when shadows combine without touching?

That’s kind of a confusing question, isn’t it? How can two things combine without touching? That’s like putting your clothes in the washing machine and they never get wet. You can do this experiment and see it for yourself. Just hold your hands up to a wall to cast two shadows. Bring your hands together slowly and the two shadows will touch just before your hands do. The shadows will be connected yet your hands are not. Thanks to Vsauce on YouTube, we know this is called The Shadow Blister Effect. I highly recommend the video. It has to do with the anatomy of a shadow. The umbra is the part of the shadow where the light is fully blocked. The prenumbra is a partial blocking (like twilight, the sun has set, but it’s still a bit light). When the two prenumbras overlap it creates a significantly greater darkness which we perceive as the combination of shadows even though the two objects aren’t touching.

3. Why do we get blisters?

You got a blister because you wore your rainboots with no socks. Put socks on before it gets worse. There are several causes of blisters. Heat, friction, and chemicals are just three of the main culprits. A blister is our skin’s way of defending itself. A layer of liquid forms between the top layers of skin to protect the tissue below it. It is best to keep the blister as long as you can. But if you’re like me and love bubble wrap, it’ll be too tempting to pop your skin bubble. That bubble is allowing the tissue to heal without the risk of infection. So if you do pop your bubble, clean it and wrap it up.

4. Can I get Facebook?

Hold on… I’ll go ask Zuckerburg. Sorry. He said awe hell no. Sure, it’s a great tool to keep in touch with family and friends. It’s also a great tool to kill some time, whether it be a few minutes or a few days. It’s also a great place to get #FakeNews and other things unimportant to our daily lives. Though, if he did get the FB he would just have a few family members on so it would probably be safe until he went exploring for more. So, no. The 10 year old will not be on Facebook for a while, yet.

Q is for…

I would love to say Q is for quiet. It’s a rare occurrence around here.  A lit match lasts longer the quiet in our house. Unless it’s after bedtime. Those 2 hours after the kids are asleep is Mommy and Daddy time. We’re not playing referee. We’re not cooking or cleaning. The kids think we always stay up late and drink wine when in fact we stay up a bit, watch adult shows and eat snacks.

But Q won’t be for quiet today. Just like last year for Q, it falls on a Thursday. Anyone familiar with this space knows that Thursday for Questions. These questions are from April 20th of last year. Lets see how their answers differ…

1. What’s your favorite thing to do in the summer?

Crash: Go to the beach
Bang: Use the sprinkler with all my friends!

2. What do sharks eat?

Crash: Fish, people sometimes if they think you are a seal, and seals
Bang: Fish and krill and shark food

3. What animal would it be fun to be?

Crash: An eagle
Bang: A mouse

4. Why would it be fun to be that animal?

Crash: a) because eagles are cool and b) because you can you fly with your wings
Bang: because you get to dig in people’s walls and live in there

5. What would you like to learn more about?

Crash: How to draw
Bang: Tigers

6. What’s the best thing about you?

Crash: I make friends easily
Bang: That I know stuff past grade 1

7. What’s the best thing about Dad?

Crash: He’s bald and you do most of the chores around the house
Bang: Not much, just one thing. You let me play on your phone because I know your password to play Candy Crush

8. What’s the best thing about Mom?

Crash: She’s losing weight and volunteers for a lot of stuff
Bang: She snuggles me

9. What do you want to be famous for doing?

Crash: Writing books or taking photographs
Bang: Running because I’m really fast

10. What do you want to be when you grow up?

Crash: Author or photographer or the good looking pop start that everyone loves
Bang: Dog washer!

 

P is for…

As parents of 2 boys, as were my parents before me, P can be for two things. Both of which refer to bathroom duties. The toilet. I think that’s my least favorite chore, even if it does take the least amount of time to clean. I’d rather do laundry all weekend than clean the toilet. Much to my dismay, life with boys requires the toilet to be cleaned on a daily basis.

Pee.

I’m considering registering them both for the fire department. The way they spray, no blaze couldn’t be stopped. And no matter how many times they get fussed at to aim IN the toilet not ON the toilet they just can’t hit the mark. I’ve seen drunks make less of a mess. Urine is on toilet seat, under the seat, behind the seat, around the base of the toilet, on the floor. What are they doing in there? Zumba?

Before we sit on the throne we have to give it wipe or else we come back up with a wet arse. It’s like the Game of Thrones, except no one dies a horrific death. They just get pee on them. Perhaps if I put a target on the bottom of the toilet they’ll make less of a mess. Give them something to aim at while they’re dancing in there.

I suppose DW has it one worse than I do. Except I never miss.

P is also for poop. That shit is gross (except mine. Mine smells like roses). Cleaning it is grosser than gross. Fortunately, they have yet to miss the target with number two. But they do forget to flush. Do you know how excited I get when I go to drain the main vain only find the toilet full of toilet paper and Mr. Hanky? C’mon guys. Flush and wash your hands. It should be routine now. You’ve been trained for 8 years now.

It must be easier with girls. Girls don’t have toilet trouble, do they? Or is it a different kind of trouble?