The Mom Things 02.10.10 - Who's with me?

The following are among the skills you can put on your mom resume:  Finding items that can double as a tissue, Creatively substituting your own adjectives and actions into "If You're Happy and You Know It" (i.e.-If you're grumpy and you know it, pout like *this*), and Convincing your kids that it's fun to clean up the playroom.

You pick your son up from school to find him wearing only his undershirt.  His response after you ask him where his shirt is:  "I lost it."  You ponder, momentarily, how one can "lose" a shirt, but don't even bother asking.

You subsequently head to the school's Lost and Found and leave with four other items that he "lost" at school over the course of the year, including his lunchbox, two jackets, and his spirit day t-shirt.

At that point, you mutter one of those granny-like cliches along the lines of, "You'd lose your head too if it weren't screwed on."

You start to feel less special about your daughter's frequent, random proclamations of love towards you when she starts frequently and randomly declaring her love for all sorts of more-trivial things including blueberries, the color pink, bananas, night gowns, and Care Bears.

People start asking you if your baby is walking yet, and you gesture towards the many bruises on her forehead and say, "She tries."

You introduce your kids to their new friends when they come over to the house.  It turns out to be an irrelevant formality because your daughter decides to call all of them "Katie" anyway.

It never used to occur to you, but now whenever you see someone in a less-than-savory career or playing a certain kind of character on television or even promoting some sort of questionable political agenda, one of your first thoughts is, "I wonder what their mother thinks of all of this."

You always thought bedtime stories were supposed to be calming and uneventful.  Your three year old feels differently and chooses this time to demonstrate her gymnastic skills, including aerial somersaults off the bed.  It's only a minor inconvenience after she lands on her head.

Similarly, you've always heard that a bath at bedtime as a nice way to unwind and relax before the rest of the nighttime routine.  You find out the hard way that baths at bedtime energize your kids almost as well as sugar wafers.