Bennett invented two new games this morning. One involves wielding a knife (of the hot pink plastic variety) and chasing his brother around the kitchen. And the other involves covering his entire face with a large alligator mask and running in circles as fast as he can. Both games ended, not surprisingly, with him running head first into a wall, toppling over and screaming at the top of his lungs.
Not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed, but he certainly is good for a laugh.
Corbin just made an unwitting reference to an ad campaign. He is in the bathtub and he told his father that he wants to use the daddy soap (Irish Springs) instead of the boy soap. Chris told him that the daddy soap was made for grown ups and Corbin replied, “And I like it too!”
This made me laugh out loud, but sadly Chris had no idea why. Please tell me someone out there remembers that old commercial with the sweater clad Irish couple!
I have (just this very evening) formed a theory.
It involves the sitting down of a family to eat a meal together every night and how, I feel, that the practice is both bizarre and obsolete.
Maybe even barbaric.
Because here’s the thing: eating is a basic body function that is necessary to sustain life.
Like sleeping or pooping.
You would never sit around and have a family chat on the crapper and you would never invite friends to come over for a nap.
So why have we decided that eating should be a communal act?
There are all these “the more you know” type parent tips on NPT that talk about how important it is to sit down and have a family meal at least once a day. They claim it helps form good eating habits and invites more open communication. But really, how much sense does it make to use eating a meal – an act that, if done correctly, makes constant use of the mouth – as a forum for discussion? I mean how good can a kid’s eating habits be if he spends 90% of the dinner hour yapping his head off about lord only knows what and the other 10% grudgingly shoveling in a few meager bites?
When you think about it this way, it would actually make more sense to make bathroom time, ‘family communication time’. At least then your mouth is unoccupied.
Not to mention the fact that the likelihood of four or more individuals all feeling like eating the same thing at the same time is slim to none. If you apply the basic body function comparison, you have to admit that most families don’t all go to sleep or go to the bathroom at the same time and under the same conditions. So why are we (we being the parents responsible for the general input/output of our families) expected to coordinate everyone’s eating habits day after day after day after day?
In Conclusion:
I like eating.
I like talking to my husband and my kids.
I just don’t like talking to my husband and my kids while I am eating.
I’d rather watch TV.
There.
I said it.
Take that NPT.
So I’ve been neglecting my blog (shamelessly) for a while now. I am doing this because a) writing anything cohesive and/or coherent seems terribly daunting and b) I have exactly 61 spam comments that I need to delete and that makes me crazy.
I still have absolutely no confidence in my ability to write anything that is co-anything right now so I’m reverting back to my old faithful list format.
1) My Bible study started back this morning and I couldn’t be more excited. The women are all lovely and Beth Moore’s hair was even bigger than last semester, so that seems promising.
2) Bennett has had another stomach virus. If Corbin gets is again I am relocating to St. John.
3) We are tiling our master-bathroom.
4) I should mention here that we haven’t started any actual tiling yet. Our labors to this point have mostly involved tearing out badly stained laminate, finding what I was convinced was mold on the sub-floor, freaking out about the presence of said perceived mold on the sub-floor, consulting with a contractor who assured me that what I thought was mold was actually just a thin layer of wood rot on the sub-floor, sanding and bleaching said wood rot on the sub-floor, and letting it dry for a full 48 hours as per the instructions of the aforementioned contractor.
5) I now suspect that perhaps we are not quite the master do it yourselfers that I had originally imagined us to be.
6) I have discovered a wonderful new tea flavored alcoholic beverage called Firefly. It mixes wonderfully with lemonade and is best enjoyed after say, a long evening spent tearing out laminate flooring.
