Yet another day in the life of Mom...

While you love that your son is independent, you consider that it may have been premature to let him make a PB&J all by his lonesome when, afterward, you cannot step anywhere on the kitchen floor without landing in a glob of jelly.

Not a day goes by where you don't have to clean the syrup/grease/mud/other unidentifiable muck off of at least one doorknob.

You're excited to finally have a reason to use the short forks in your silverware set.  (The refined would call them salad forks, but we hardly have a need to set a full place setting in our home.)

You've experienced a child whose waist was inexplicably small and whose legs were inexplicably long.  So much so, in fact, that not even spandex leggings stay up, giving everyone a glance of the undies.  The phenomenon can best be explained visually as seen here:

Sometimes it isn't until years later when you look at the pictures from any random event that you discover your kids shoes were on backwards, and you wonder - were they like that the whole day?

You know that the best way to stop your kids from doing whatever it was that they were doing (good or bad) is to pull out the camera.

You fear that your infant is destined to follow in his daddy's engineering ways when he completely ignores the mobile with the red-nosed bears hanging above his swing, and instead watches the hinge swing back and forth, as if already trying to figure out how the thing works.

Dress-up is not just a game, it's a way of life.

You keep a stash of popsicles in the outdoor chest freezer for refreshments on hot summer days, to gain popularity with the neighborhood kids, and to use as payment for yard work when your 8 year old neighbor wants to help you in the flower beds.   (Hey, it's cheaper than a high schooler!)

At the first sound of a burp or toot (as we call them in our house), your kids' eyes brighten up and a devilish grins creep up on their faces.  After all, bodily noises are timelessly funny.