The Weirdness, It is Everywhere

Date Night
Have you ever taken a 3 year old to any sort of Sesame Street/Disney/Ice Capades type event? I have. Just did it tonight, in fact. Tate and I had a night out at the social event of the...hour. It went surprisingly smoothly, for the most part...pretty much, kinda. As soon as I sat down, I felt like we were living on borrowed time. You know, where you just kinda sit and watch the kid, observing the initial excitement starting to wane and boredom and tiredness slowly creep in. Now, we had front row seats (yeah, I got an in with Elmo. What can I say) so at least we were RIGHT THERE. The problem was, we were RIGHT THERE at the very far side of the stage, so for m

Sweet Cheez-its.
Tate's becoming a pro at this whole preschool thing. Every morning as we drive there, he exclaims "I'm SO excited, Mom!" and every afternoon as we drive home, he gives me a garbled rundown of all his activities that day. Usually it's how they learned about dinosaurs or apples or owls, but last week was something rather...unexpected. This was the scene in the car ride home:Me: "So, what did you learn about today, Tate?"Tate: "Cheez-its."Me: "...Cheez-its?"Tate: "Yep. Cheez-its."Me: "You mean you had Cheez-its at snack time?"Tate: "NO! WE TALKED ABOUT CHEEZ-ITS!!"

Ok, for any of yo...
Ok, for any of you who are A) not parents and therefore not used to dealing with this kind of stuff or B) extremely grossed out by gooey things, let's just save you major discomfort right now by saying this: SLIMY GREEN EYE BOOGERS. Oh, and EYELIDS CRUSTED TOGETHER WITH GOOPY, STRINGY, MUCOUS-Y EYE MATTER. And what the hell...DIARRHEA. Yep, you can leave now. I understand.Yeah, the kids have pinkeye. I started to suspect something when Tate woke up this morning unable to open his right eye due to it being glued together with slimy yellowish glop. Oh, and when Nora's eyes both started looking kinda swollen and, uh...pink. Well, pink aside from the neon-green slime sli

Candy? What Candy?
I'm pretty convinced that toddler ears are tuned to a certain frequency that allows them to hear candy being opened from anywhere in the house. Seriously. I have the Halloween goods stashed away in a corner of the house we're rarely in to discourage the kids (and myself...who am I kidding) from going through it in a mad, sugar-crazed frenzy more than a couple times a day. I swear, whenever I notice the kids are upstairs without me and probably smearing Vaseline all over the dogs, rugs and toilet seats, and creep over to the stash of candy to snag something, it always ends the same way. I open the wrapper. I hear: Thump. Thump. Thumpthumpthudthudthudthud.

Out of the Mouths of Babes
All of a sudden, Nora is really talking. A new word here, a new word there. "Please", "Cheese", "Okay" "Tate" and, uh..."Gracias." I don't know if she's decided to be half Spanish, or if Tate is sneakily teaching her a foreign language in one his late-night seminars on How to Drive Mom as Crazy as Possible in 100 Days or Less or Your Money Back. One of these days they're going to playing in the next room and I'll hear Tate say "Vamos a ir a tomar una botella de vodka del armario y de un paseo en coche." Nora wil