What???

After a morning play dough craft session Nathan informed me that his preschool teacher showed him the right way to clean up all the little pieces. He formed a ball with the biggest portion of play dough and then exclaimed, while punching down the big ball on all the stray flecks of color, "see, this is so much easier. How come you didn't know how to do this mommy?"

Seriously? Do they learn anything I try to teach? Why does the teacher get full credit for that tidbit of cleanup cleverness? Eh, no matter. I'm just grateful the mess gets cleaned up and now he has fun doing it.

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A couple of weeks ago Levi came over to hang out with the boys for a while. It has become more and more obvious that he is in need of new pants. The holes in his knees are worse than they ever were when he was a toddler, but then again I never bought pants with holes already in them when he was a toddler.

Later that day, I was undressing Hyrum for his bath and noticed that he had 4 little snips in the knee of his pants and I knew they were not there when I dressed him that morning. He was so proud of his accomplishment as he explained to me that he "tut hose" in his pants, "yike Yevi". Yep, he used a pair of scissors and had nice little triangle clips that have since spread to actual holes and they are sure to look just like Levi's pants in the next few weeks.


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Mom to Nathan: "It's time for naps".

Nathan to Mom: "Let me think about that for a second."

Nathan, after a brief pause: "Nope, I don't think that will be acceptable today."

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Last week Justin missed 4 out of 5 days school due to an attack of the flu and sinus bugs going around. Being the great educator that I am and in complete concern about the school work that he was getting behind on, I sat with Justin and Nathan to watch an episode of Psych for a mid-day literature lesson. After it was over Justin walked over to the Wii (our Netflix instant play connection) and Nathan groggily said in disgust, "Justin, what the he!! are you doing" with perfect inflection imitating Henry Spencer's over used expression to his son, Shawn.

I probably should have used something more kindergarten appropriate. I could have avoided the "but, what is a swear word?" lesson that followed. I tried to explained that a swear word is like the other words that we don't use because they aren't nice. "Like, stupid and shut-up and dummy . . . " he questioned,using every word that we have tried to delete from our family conversations. Yep, little man, all of those too.


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One morning Hyrum was rather solemn and wanted us to all be quiet. This is rather unusual for our energetic little master of all things noisy. LeRoy was making phone calls, which is always done in full volume (tree, apple). Hyrum sat there next to me and asked, "what da het is daddy doing?" And then he kept repeating it over and over again as if he was practicing it and making sure he had it right.

I probably should have stopped him with some sort of gentle lesson about words we don't need to use but it was just too cute to not have for future family home video viewing. After the phrase Nathan had used, Hyrum's didn't seem so bad.