Do you know my daughter? If you’ve read my blog long, you KNOW her.

She’s something of a riot.

I’m grateful for her, you know. TRULY grateful. Last night, as I knelt by my bedside and said my evening prayers, they went something like this:
“THANKYOUFORMYDAUGHTER!!!!!!… amen.”

Thursday night, I started feeling not-so-good. I sipped a little Sprite and tried to shrug it off. A few hours later, I was well beyond sipping Sprite… I was guzzling Pepto. I spent a fitful night wandering between the bathroom and my bed, willing sleep to come.
That said: I did not get out of bed on Thursday until 3 pm. That means that from 7 am to 3 pm, my children took care of themselves while I slipped in and out of a sleep that felt heavily medicated (sadly, I didn’t have any medicine strong enough to produce the sleep I slept; consequently, the sleep I received MUST have come directly from angels… probably the same ones who watched over my flock while I slept).
I can sort of remember my children singing to me.
I remember them coming in my room to raid their stockings.
I remember the girl instructing the boy on just how much egg nog was appropriate to drink at once.

And that’s about it.
I hunched over and made my way around the house around noon, handed the girl 4 slices of whole wheat bread (healthy!), a butter knife, and a full container of Nutella (thereby nullifying the whole “healthy” theme I was going for).
“Look,” I drawled out, “See? Put the chocolate on the bread. Fold it. Sandwich.”
“Sandwich!” My daughter cried out and proceeded to make ninety of them.

She also took out my trash (so well as a little girl can, anyway).
She also did my laundry.
Upon further inspection (which I finally got around to today), I found that she had emptied not only half of that Sam’s Club size box of Ozy-clean into the washer… but that she had emptied the bowl I had near the washer that was FULL of our homemade laundry detergent. Best of all? She put some in the dryer.
Thorough she is.

My husband discovered the detergent in the dryer, and when he did he let out a sentence the likes of which went something like this, “WHAT THE? OH MAN! IT’S IN THE DRYER!”
The girl, who happened to be sitting next to me at the time, muttered, “I just said I was sorry about it. I didn’t know you only need ONE scoop…”
And so we can’t be mad.

We can’t be mad about the plate she shattered as she reached for peanut butter because Nutella only lasts for so long.
I wasn’t mad. I really wasn’t.

As I was curled up in a ball on the floor Thursday night (when most of the “laundry” got done), my daughter asked me to follow her into my bedroom where I had put the bird for the day while I babysat my niece and nephew.

I went into my room to find the boy cutting a paper into small pieces and FEEDING them to the small bird who -no less guilty -had a wedge of paper in his little bitty beak.
I hollered out something like, “DANNY! DANNY! DANNY!” because I know that paper isn’t good for birds, and my daughter BURST into tears.
The thing is: I was so wrapped up in the paper/bird situation that I didn’t even notice that my daughter had MADE decorations for her bird’s cage.
Well she had.
And she thought I was MAD about it.

“I just did the decorations and you are mad and IT’S ALL MY FAULT!!!!”

I wasn’t mad! I wasn’t! It took me thirty minutes to try and explain myself which was nearly impossible given that I was crying myself on account of
1) making my daughter cry and
2) feeling like I wanted to die.

I’ve recovered almost completely. So far, no one else has gotten sick. The house? That’s a horse of a different color. I’ve spent today cleaning and cleaning and cleaning, stopping only to sit on the couch and read Ben Franklin’s Autobiography (a gem among books).
But my trash-taking out, sandwich-making, laundry-doing, decoration-making daughter?
Well.
I’ve watched her during the last two days as she’s used up half the bird seen in a successful attempt to train her little bird to EAT OUT OF HER HAND.
She did this without any help from us. No one told my daughter how to train her bird to eat out of her hand, but come to think of it… she doesn’t need any instruction in that area.
She’s had me eating out of her hand for ages.

image from deadline.com

Do you know this guy’s name?
Of course you do. PLEASE don’t tell my daughter what his real name is. I’m getting such a kick out of her talking about “Frickin’ Stein.”

Thanks in advance.

The snake incident really affected my daughter.  She’s been asking questions about it ever since.  It didn’t help that last night she snuggled up to me as I watched a movie before bed and just happened to come in RIGHT when the main character was bit in the hand by a rattlesnake.

She’s terrified.

“I’m scared about snakes,” she told me yesterday.
“Sometimes we’re scared of things because we don’t know enough about them,” I explained, “If we learn more about snakes we’ll be less afraid of them and more smart about them.”
“Okay,” she nodded.
“So… what do you want to learn about snakes?” I asked.
“How to hide from them,” she replied.

Come to think of it… that just might be the best thing I could ever teach my child about snakes.
HIDE!

For about a month now, my girl has been begging to get her hair cut. I sort of hoped she’d forget about it because I was in LOVE with her long hair, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“Did you call Julie, Mom?”
“Did you call Julie, Mom?”
“Did you call Julie, Mom?”

She asked and asked and asked. Julie, it must be known if not already inferred, is our family hair lady. We love Julie.
Julie has dum-dums.

We finally set up an appointment, and Lacy eagerly awaited the day. The morning of, I wrapped my arms around her and said, “Guess what today is?”
“What?”
“HAIR DAY!” I squealed.
“I DON’T WANT TO GET MY HAIR CUT!” She wailed back.
Ha.
Women.

I talked her down, telling her that Julie would never do anything that Lacy wouldn’t like.
“Just sit in her special chair and tell her exactly what you want,” I said.
“Okay,” she replied.
Also: I promised her ice cream when the hair dressing was done.

Once there, Lacy sat in the chair.
“Tell Julie what you want,” I coaxed her.
“I just don’t know all the words to say it,” she shyly replied.

So here’s what we came up with:

I took a bunch of pictures in the salon, but my phone won’t email them to me (selfish, selfish).

I do miss her long hair, but she got what she asked for and she’s mostly happy. The night after it was cut, she did confess that she wanted to “turn it back” but it’s since grown on her. She feels like a big girl with a big girl haircut.

On Monday, I was running through my cleaning routine. After getting the house mostly clean (vacuumed, mopped, all that), I set to getting my one big project done. For this Monday, I decided to clean out the fridge. The boy was napping. The girl was playing outside.
It was perfect timing.
I cleaned half of the fridge and took the trash out before finishing to avoid a huge triple-bagging fiasco.
You know what I’m talking about, right? That huge, ugly bag of trash at the end of fridge cleaning that you have to bag at least three times… please tell me I’m not the only one.

As I walked out of the door and tossed the trash into the plastic trash bins, Lacy ran to my side.
“Mom, can you play outside with me?”
“I would love to, sweetie. Really, I would. But I have to finish cleaning out the fridge.”
“But Mom! We could pick up leaves… and look at clouds…”
“Okay, let me hurry and finish the fridge.”
“Thanks, Mom.”

And I went back in the house to finish furiously dumping food out of my fridge. I didn’t bother wiping it clean on account of my cloud-watching date, but my daughter did manage to put herself right outside my window.
“MOM!” She called, “ARE YOU HURRYING?!”
“YES!” I called back.
“THANK YOU!”

My girl has always held the outdoors in high esteem… even when she was a colicky baby, screaming in my arms, she would quiet right down the minute I took her outside and let the sunshine stream all over her red little face.

Enjoying it with her will ALWAYS take precedence over a perfectly clean fridge. It’s mold free, okay? That’s as good as it’s going to get for now.

When I was a little girl, my favorite weekend of the year was the weekend my father took my brothers to Fathers and Sons outing.  When they left, it was just ME and my MOM.  Well, for five years, anyway.  After that there was a pretty little red-headed sister to go with.

Anyway, one year in particular always stood out to me.  It was by far and away the most special.  Mom invited her friend Tammy over.  Her friend Tammy had a daughter named Lindsay, and Lindsay and I were great friends.  Mom told me that we were going to… watch “Cinderella” and eat cookie dough!  I should have liked to DIE from the excitement of it all.  Mom set fancy place mats on the floor in front of the TV, put cookie dough on a glass plate, and then let me relish everything girly.  It. Was. Spectacular.

Yesterday, I braved the city alone.  Alone plus my kids, I mean. Remember my last trip?  The one where my kids ate gum from under the tables and yelled out “Doggy Doo Doo!” in the middle of a food court?  Well, yesterday was MUCHmuchmuchmuch better.  We had a good time, all in all.  I came home and put most of my groceries away.  I usually put them ALL away right when I get home, but after a day in the city with my kids -even a good day -I’m exhausted.  I was so glad I bought a rotisserie chicken for dinner right up until the moment I opened the back hatch of my car and it fell out, popped open like a plastic Easter egg and absolutely rolled in my gravel driveway.  You can bet I brought it right in the house and rinsed the snot out of it.  And then? We ate it.  There’s nothing wrong with a little grit in your diet, right?  My husband pulled me up next to him on the couch to show me the latest and greatest phones.  I’m up for an upgrade and there’s nothing he loves better than new techie toys.  It wasn’t but 10 minutes into his clicking on pictures of phones that I realized something: I didn’t care about phones.  I just wanted to watch a television show and completely zone out.  So I told him that -nicely, of course.  He understood, helped me get the kids to bed, and then he went to bed himself after turning all of the lights off in the house.  I was left alone with the comforting glow of the television.

Until my daughter came out.

“Mom, my movie is over.”
“Okay, run and go potty and then go to bed.”
Off she went.
“Mom,” she came back a few minutes later, “Can I have a drink?”
“Not at night, baby.”
“A snack?”
“There’s grapes in the fridge.”
Off she went.

It was getting ridiculously late. I watched the clock pass 1 am -I knew I was staying up way too late, but it just felt SO good to sit and think of NOTHING and have NO ONE need me.
“Mom,” I looked up to see my daughter standing in front of me in the darkness, “I just have a sleepover for us in my room. You might come. I have blankets and a pillow for us and dolls for me and for you.”
Ummmmm… adorable.
Could YOU tell her that it was 1:15 in the morning and there’s no such thing as sleepovers for 4 year olds at 1 AM?! I couldn’t. I absolutely could not. I snagged her, had her watch the end of my TV show with me, and then I made my way into her room where a party awaited.

Blankets, pillows, and dolls as promised. The movie of choice? Cinderella.
She handed me a small bunch of grapes and directed me to a small wooden box where I could put the stems.
The dolls had been primped accordingly.

So we HAD to be dressed to match:

As Cinderella played on her television screen, she informed me that at slumber parties… you PLAY.
“We might just play and then put our toys away like Daddy says to.”
We played dolls until they all got fevers. Then we played doctors using a night eye mask (the white silky kind) as a doctor’s face mask (because it works better for that anyway). Around 2, I explained to her that while slumber parties are great fun, I still had to get up with the boy sleeping on the bed next to us.
She wasn’t having it.
But she finally gave in.
And guess what? I’ve been up for over and hour and she’s still sleeping soundly on her floor. Trenton is actually using her as a big pillow and she’s dead to the world.
The special thing about my daughter -er, ONE of the special things -is that if she takes even the slightest bit of a nap, she won’t sleep at night.
And yes, she slept in the car on the drive home from the city.

Someone please come bolster me up today. I’ve got groceries to put away, toys to go through (we were given an entire SLEW of toys from Aunt Lilly last night. TWO BINS of Polly Pockets. She couldn’t be happier!), a kitchen to clean (my son climbed on the counter yesterday and helped himself to powdered sugar, butter, and dry spaghetti noodles. Yum?).
And a few phone calls.
And errands.
“And then there’s the mending and the sewing and the laundry…”

But I’m tired!  The priceless slumber party has taken my motivation from me.  But it was MORE than totally worth it.  Not to brag or anything (but of course I mean to)… my daughter is the coolest.

At night, we do scripture reading. Lately, we’ve been streaming New Testament scripture stories on youtube. They’re the same stories I enjoyed as a kid -only these have been made into videos. As soon as we watch a few clips and discuss them, the kids always beg to watch Julian Smith videos.

I had NO idea what that video would be about -needless to say it scared the diapers off my kids.
“I want to watch monsters again,” my daughter said, shaking.
“No,” I said.
“I don’t like monsters,” she said, “We can watch it again. We can. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to watch it.”
“It wasn’t a monster. Someone just played dress-up and dressed like a monster to be silly,” I said.
“But I don’t want to be a monster for Halloween!” She cried out.
“What do you want to be?”
“Snow White!”
“What color is her dress?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” She crumpled into a ball.
“Blue and yellow… it will be so fun to make.” I said.
“NO! We just -we just…” her lip began quivering, “We just needa BUY it at Wal-Mart!”
“But think how much fun it would be to make!”
“OR I could be a monster…” she said.

At this point, I realized that she was beyond tired.

“I could be a grey bunny monster and I could say ‘rwar!’ and scare every body!” She smiled.
“Yeah, what would grandpa say?”
“He would just say ‘AHHHHHH!’ like that.”
I turned to Trent and asked him what he wanted to be.
“I don’t like munnsters,” He said, “I wanna be Iron Man for Halloween.”
I turned back to Lacy.
“I don’t want to be a monster!” She cried. “I don’t LIKE Halloween! I think I will be sick. My head…” she put her hand on her forehead, “My head is getting so warm.”
“No, it’s not.” I chuckled, “But that’s fine. You don’t have to go to the big Halloween party.”
“Party?” She took her hand down from her forehead.
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of GAMES and KIDS and CAKE… and then after the party we go trick or treating and we knock of everyone’s houses and they give us candy. So much candy! But you can stay home with Daddy and rest in bed because you’re sick. I’ll just take Trent to the party with candy and then we’ll go trick or treating without you.”
She thought about that for a minute and then she said…
“I can be a pink monster…”
“That would be so fun!” I gushed.
“But then I would be so scary…” her voice started quivering and building higher and higher as she spoke, “And then I would knock and then every one would run away because they would be so scared and I wouldn’t get any CANDY!”
And the dam in her eyes broke.
Tears spilled everywhere. She got up from the couch and fled into her room to fling herself on her bed (Belle style). Once there she sobbed.
And sobbed.
Oh, the HORROR of being such a SCARY PINK MONSTER that you SCARE EVERYONE and then you WON’T GET ANY CANDY!

It’s too much.
It’s too much.

Let’s just skip the whole idea this year, shall we?