For all my "urban chicken" lovin' friends!

Mom sent me a couple of tubes of this lip balm. Of course, it gave me a good giggle when I read the label. I took it upstairs to a freshly bathed Monkey Man as he has had chapped lips alot lately. Anyway, he grabbed it and started smearing it on. I looked at him with my best surprised and shocked face and said, "Buddy, you should read the label of things before you just start to smear them on your lips!" He jerked it away and read the label and had this sudden look of horror and repulsion that was priceless! "MOM!" A moment of silence, then, "Wait a minute, this doesn't REALLY have poop in it!" A look of relief and a giggle from a mean Mommy! I love terrorizing my kids! Is that bad?

Anyhoo... for those of you interested in obtaining your own "Chicken Poop" you can find it at:

www.ilovechickenpoop.com

Making rum balls!

You know how it goes, you come across photos that were taken weeks ago and think, "Oh yeah! I forgot about that!" And so it comes that I should throw out a quick entry regarding the making of rum balls. We do this every year for the big White Elephant Party. We have now become pros at rolling chocolate into little balls and dusting them with assorted sugars, nuts, etc... The Monkey Man thought we looked gross and decided to take a picture of Mommy and Daddy looking like we had, well, poo on our hands! Gotta love the 6 y.o. sense of humor!

Bathroom etiquette

So I really didn't mean to have my mind in the toilet today, but it just seems like the topic won't go away! I took the Monkey Man over to my friend Amy's house for our weekly science co-op. As we were about to load up in the car to go home, I am informed by the Monkey Man that he needs to poop. Such impeccable timing! So we went back in and I helped Amy clean up a little more while the boy did his thing. He finishes, we say our good-byes and out the door we go. Well about 6 blocks after we left I thought to ask him if he had flushed. To which I was told, much to my great horror, that he had not! Seriously!?!?! I am at my wits end here! For months I have gently reminded him to flush, I have yelled at him to flush, I have threatened to take toys away if he doesn't flush, but NOTHING seems to make an impact! So, at this moment, his is in the kitchen writing, "I will flush when I poop." twenty-six times. Then I'm going to make him write an apology to Amy for dropping a deuce in her crapper and not flushing! I am wondering if this will have any impact whatsoever on his actions. I guess only time will tell. But I swear, if I open up the toilet one more time to find an unflushed present, I may have to give him a swirly!

Things that make you go hmmmmm....

So does this mean pink for the girls and blue for the boys?!? Yes! That would actually be so very cool because we girls DO NOT like sharing port-a-potties with boys! It is beyond disgusting! I think in general, if it involves boys and bathrooms it is just gross, I should know, I live with two boys and I'm the one that cleans the bathrooms! To give mine credit, they are nowhere near as nasty as most, but they are still messier than girls. I mean you know boys must be bad when my hubby REFUSES to take the Monkey Man into any public men's room unless he has no other choice! And if he does have to take him into one, the child is immediately slathered in Purell upon leaving! I have luckily never been inside a public men's room and I am thankful, but I HAVE been in co-ed port-a-potties. So... upon seeing these port-a-potties (they call them Honey-Buckets here, which is sick and wrong in its own special way), I am whole-heartedly in support of port-a-potty segregation!

What 's a mother to do?

As most of you know, I have a 5 1/2 y.o. son. He is without a doubt the light of my life and in all honesty a really good kid. I am always getting compliments about how polite he is, how sweet and caring he is and of course what beautiful curly locks he has (he gets that from me!). But as we near the tender age of 6, I can tell there are some serious changes on the horizon. It is obvious that he is really beginning to see himself as a separate and free-thinking entity. Which in the general sense of things is good. I mean this is our job right? To raise our children to be healthy, cognitive beings that can navigate through the vast sea of crap we refer to as life. We hope we arm them well with strong values, humanity and a consciousness about the world around them. However, in order to accomplish this task, we have to let go, give up some of the control and holy shit... that's hard!

As of late, I find myself nagging at him. Nagging about stupid shit! You know, flushing the toilet after he poops, not taking toys away from his sister, not making horrible gagging sounds in the back seat, not swinging on the stair bannisters, not constantly trying to get his baby sister to say words like poop, butt, booby and pee-pee (I mean seriously, how many other words are in the English language for him to teach her, but NOOOO, he wants her to say poo-poo in the restaurant!) So I call him on these behaviors, but I call him on these things DAILY! Seriously, I have told this child and yelled at this child to "FLUSH THE TOILET WHEN YOU POOP" everyday since he learned how to use the potty at age 3! He is 5 1/2 now that is over 2 years, so I have re-iterated this rule at least 912 times!!!! What is it in the 5 y.o. brain that makes it impossible to remember these simple things? I mean he can remember what he did 2 years ago at Balloon Fiesta in ABQ, or what he did at Nana's shop 4 visits ago, but he CANNOT for the life of him remember to flush the pot! So I am starting to feel like one of those nagging mothers you see at the grocery store constantly bitching at her kids. I desperately don't want to be THAT mother! But then again, what happens if I neglect to call him on these things? Will he lose his respect for me, will he feel that if he does something long enough, I'll just finally cave and he'll get his way regardless? I know I may sound like a Nazi, but I do not cut that kid slack. I'm not a terribly strict parent, but I do believe that there are certain rules that make co-habitating with your family easier and you must follow them, not to mention rules of conduct when engaging in life outside the home. And when he doesn't abide by these there are consequences. His sister will be held to the same standards. But I do hate being that naggy, bitchy mom. I want my kids to remember me as someone they had fun with, not someone that bitched at them all the time. So, I'm at a loss. Do I ease up and accept the fact that this is the beginning of him becoming an individual being with thoughts and feelings of his own, or do I stay diligent and work to make sure he follows through with direction and understands consequences? I'm just really not sure what the happy medium is here.

That's crap!

So here's how it starts, we find a big, fat caterpillar at the park. We bring him home, set him up in the butterfly enclosure that we used to raise Painted Ladies last year. Anyway, I decide to do a little research on the care and keeping of caterpillars, after all, I don't want him to meet his ultimate demise in my care. I would be sad and my son would be devastated! While aquiring other tidbits of information I discover that caterpillar poop is called "frass". Actually, upon further research I find that "frass" is the preferred term for bug poop in general, who knew? Is it just me, or does there seem to be a veritable shit-load of words to describe, well shit? I mean there are the obvious ones like feces, dung and excrement. But what about the more specialized terms? Let's see, we have "guano" for bats and birds, yet bird poop is also described as a "dropping" which seems quite accurate if you ask me! Rodents produce pellets and rabbits also produce pellets, but they also produce things called cecotropes, which are reingested by the rabbit. Hello, call me crazy but I'd rather have 4 stomachs and chew cud than to have to eat anything that comes out my arse, but hey, if it works for them, cool. Elephants produce "balls" (approximately 500 lbs worth in a 24-hour period...call me impressed!), worms produce "vermidung", and whales, bears, and Bigfoot (or would that be Bigfeet?) produce "scat". Actually scat is pretty universally used to describe feces of a many animals, I have heard skunk poop referred to as scat and so on. Let's not forget our farmyard friends, we have manure as a general term and bovidung if we want to be polite, but then there are cow pies or patties, meadow muffins and prairie chips or in Scotland they call it "coo plab" and in Newfoundland they call it "cow plates" (are their cows bigger?). Horses in the country make horse apples, but in the city they make "alley apples" (I guess that's what your local police horse leaves behind!). There are "moose berries", "elk duds" and "deer pellets". And I think it is safe to assume that dog poop could technically be referred to as "contact information"! And as much as I might like to go on, I won't even get started on the infinite variety of words and phrases that we humans use to describe our own excrement. Maybe in another blog, in fact, maybe I'll send out a poll to all my friends to find out their favorite terminology. Stay tuned for that!

Diapers...don't get me started!

As is probably obvious, I am a mother. A mother to an almost 5 year old son and a 5 month old daughter. Now when I had my daughter (4 1/2 years after having my son) I was amazed at the advances in baby gear!! The strollers are so much more versatile and light weight, the diaper bags now look like hip Gucci bags, the carseats have side impact protectors, you name it, they probably have it. But here is the odd thing, there has obviously been no advances in diapers. In fact, I am pretty sure that disposable diapers of today are hardly better than the ones used in the 70's!! How do I know this?? I know this because my beautiful, sweet, precious baby girl shoots crap straight up the back of her outfit at least every other day!! Why? Because diapers are not fitted around the top! Not to say that the fittings around the legs don't leak, cause they do, but for some reason all it takes is for the child to be sitting in any upright position when said poop happens and instead of being absorbed or dispersing in the lower part of the diaper, it shoots straight up the back, over the top and soils that sweet, pink and frilly onesie (at the most inopportune time, of course)! i just find it odd that we can make cars that can park themselves, but we CANNOT seem to make a diaper that can actually contain baby shit!! It's not like there isn't a market for such an item. Ask any haggard mother who has been in a restaurant or store and picked up her adorable child only to realize that not only the child, but the carseat and herself are covered in poop and I'm sure she would tell you in no uncertain terms that she would practically KILL to have a diaper that worked! But I don't think it will be something that I will see in my lifetime. Diaper companies don't feel the need to truly improve the diaper since we will buy them regardless. I mean what else are we gonna do? I suppose I could use cloth diapers, maybe they actual contain biohazardous waste better than disposables, but then there is the downside of having to wash them!! It is bad enough washing the nasty, poo-stained onesies! I would surely wretch if I had to wash cloth diapers! So the cycle will continue, I will continue using disposable diapers, and my daughter will continue ruining onesies and that will be my life until she learns how to poop in a toilet!