My son wrote a Spiderman story (his current theme of choice, which is a departure from last year when virtually all of his stories involved giant Venus flytraps devouring buildings and people) this week, and upon re-reading it discovered that he had omitted the period at the end of one of the sentences.

“Oh no! There’s no period at the end of this sentence.” he exclaimed, “I’ve committed wrongdoing!”

He’s nine. So I responded with

“Not the grammatical malfeasance!” which is, of course, the proper response when confronted with punctuational panic. For some reason he thought that was funny. He also told me later that evening that he had taken something I said to him literally. I don’t think he quite knows what that means, but he was not too far off on his usage so he must have some idea. What a great vocabulary! I think it’s from listening to books on tape that are several years above his reading level.

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Tonight the house looked atrocious as it does at least every other day before clean up time (I can’t figure out how they can demolish a home so quickly. The government should use them for enemy scare tactics or something.). I told them to go clean up everything off the floor and then they could go watch the SpongeBob Atlantis show their Daddy had nicely recorded for them. Trinity and Anika found their new gloves with fingers on the floor while they were tidying and decided that instead of putting them away, they could be pressed into a much more interesting service.

So naturally they put them on their…. feet and walked around the house making gorilla noises and screeches while they were cleaning until I couldn’t stand the racket and hollered at them to quit making weird noises (I say this at least once a day, usually to Anika who is the wacky noise queen). They left the gorilla feet on and contented themselves with proclaiming me as the GorillaMom, which is how they addressed me when they kissed me and headed up to bed. No, I have no plans to put gloves on my feet tomorrow just in case you were wondering.

Rachel

I can’t imagine how fast our kids could destroy a house. Our 2 can destroy everything I have done in about 30 seconds flat and that is enough for me! I love reading your blog Rachel!

Yes, it falls into one of those things that you can’t really explain to people who don’t have kids. They either think you’re nuts, exaggerating, or that their kids will never do that because their kids will be perfect. Yeah right!

Rachel