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Ten Things That Made Me Laugh Lately

It's been a hysterical week...

1) My 4yo daughter was doing one of those electronic puzzles where you have to answer a question to reveal the picture on the other side of the puzzle piece.  She got halfway thru the puzzle and guessed, "M&Ms under there?"

When she was done, the puzzle was, in fact, a bunch of M&Ms.  She proclaimed, "I stand correctly!"

2) The other day my 7yo went to a party and got his face painted to look like Abraham Lincoln.  (Beard, warts, etc.)  My 8yo history buff walked up to him, raised his "gun" (index finger outstretched, thumb in the air, fingers curled) and yelled, "SIC SEMPER TYRANNUS" which is what John Wilkes Booth yelled before shooting Abraham Lincoln.  But WHO FUCKING KNOWS THAT?

3) My 8yo SORT OF collects those NFL stickers that come in the paper every week - at least he did last year.  Then he made my other son put them in the sticker book for him.  This week I pulled the stickers out of the paper and asked my daughter to give them to my 7yo.  She looked at me, "You mean the 8yo?"  My husband said, "She SAID the 7yo."  So my daughter shrugged and gave them to the 7yo in the other room.  All of a sudden I heard the 8yo yell, "THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!"

4) We went apple picking on Sunday.  We go every year with my friend and her family.  She has a 2 year old.  He loves to be tickled.  I love tickling.  When I walked in he was being shy.  I said, "You really won't say hi to me?  Do I need to turn you upside down, shake you, drop you on your head and tickle you?"

His face lit up, "YES!" he said.

And so I did.

5) This next one is not so much a funny, funny, ha, ha laugh as much as it is an, "OMG, What the fuck is wrong with you? laugh."

We keep a small container in the kids bathroom that we use to rinse the soap out of the girls' hair when they take a bath.  Tonight my husband noticed that it had "water" in it - but when he looked more closely he realized that it wasn't water.  My son had peed in it when he was in the shower and left it on the edge of the tub.

BOYS.

6) Last month we went to a neighborhood party.  During the party my son and his friends decided to play ding-dong ditch.  The problem?  They rang the doorbell of the SAME HOUSE 6 times.  Worse?  My son went last.  By the time he approached the door, the 80 year old woman who lived there was waiting for him.  He never even knocked.  As soon as he got to the front steps, she whipped open the door and screamed.  My son, 7, screamed back.  After she scared the shit out of him she invited him in to have a look around.  He went.  It sounds creepier than it actually was (I think.)

Yesterday, my family went for a walk around the block.  As we approached the old woman's house my 8yo son turned to my younger son and said, "I'm going to go dingdong ditch Grandma!"

We all burst out laughing that he called her grandma.

 7) My 6yo daughter walked into the kitchen about an hour before my son's friends came over for "book club."  "I'm going to take a shower." she said. 

"Why are you showering now?" My husband asked her.  "You always shower before bed."

"If I shower now, I won't have to do it later." she told him.  Then she looked at me and winked so that he couldn't see.

"Wait until later." he asked her.  She walked up to him and kissed him on the nose.  "I'll be down in a few minutes."

He turned to me, "She's just fucking with me, isn't she?"

"Well," I said.  "She MAY be fucking with you.  Or she may just be sweet.  You can choose to believe whichever one you want but I choose to believe that she is just being sweet."

She walked back into the room, held up a pair of skinny jeans she just got as a pair of hand-me-downs that have silver sequin peace signs on the butt and said, "Do these look ok?"

Then she walked out before we could answer.

My husband looked at me.

"Ok" I said, "NOW she is TOTALLY fucking with you."

8. This weekend, when my 6yo daughter would catch my husband and I hugging or kissing she would yell, "LOVE HAWK!" 

9. I watched Rio with the kids last night for the second time.  It was fine but it was REALLY fun to watch my 7yo son sing and dance samba all day today!

10. We went to a Halloween block party today, there was a magician there who was pretty good.

Try this at home:

Spell MOP

Spell TOP

Spell HOP

Answer this: What do you do at a green light?

Did you say STOP?

Gotcha!

The kids loved it.

Ten Things That Made Me Laugh Lately

I kept saying I should write these things down as they happened but I didn't.  Hopefully I can remember ten of them. Sometimes it's more important to live life than to write about it.

1. My 9year old is so passionate about Halloween costumes that we had to enact an official rule that in my house that you can't start talking about Halloween until AT LEAST September.  Otherwise he starts in April and totally drives me CRAZY.  So for the past couple of weeks he's had his heart set on attending a Rennaissance fair and decided that a knight costume could do double duty.  I promised to take him to the Spirit Halloween store today - so I did.  As enthusiastic as my son is about Halloween he is a HUGE chicken and at one point at Spirit I lost track of him and found him crouched in the fetal position with his eyes closed in front of a robotic zombie.

Yes, I laughed.

2. 2 minutes later I turned to my son and asked, "You know what your 4 year old baby sister would be doing if she were here?"

"Crying in fear?" he answered.

"No. Making fun of you." I told him.

"Thanks for ruining my happy thought." he shot back.

3. 2 minutes later he turned to me, pointed across the store and said, "You should get that ugly clown mask Mom.  It suits you." 

4. Despite harassing me all week to take him to Spirit for a costume, my 9yo couldn't find the knight costume he wanted there.  I'll take you to "It's a Party" later this week I promised.  "PLEASE?" he asked.  So we went.  On the way my 7yo, who had drunk an entire 32ounce bottle of Gatorade at the grocery store and refused to go to the bathroom, realized that he had to pee.  We spent the entire ride from Spirit to It's a Party making water noises.  When we got there we christened it, "It's a Potty."  which is much funnier if you live in a place with Boston accents.

5. We went to a party on Sunday afternoon.  Some of the boys at the party decided it would be fun to play ding-dong-ditch on the old lady next door.  When it was my 7yo son's turn to ring the bell the woman had had enough and she was peeking out the door.  When my son raised his hand to knock she opened the door and screamed.

"Mom," my son told me as he recounted the story, "She screamed.  And then I screamed like a little girl!" 

The picture of the little old lady screaming - and then him screaming back was so hilarious I spit my Diet Coke out everywhere.

6. As we were walking to the party I said to my husband, we'll need something to carry the pumpkins (because they give out pumpkins at the party every year.)  He grabbed the red wagon.  "You might want to wash that dad." my 9yo said.  "Because I accidentally peed in it."

Just as I started to ask him how you accidentally pee in a red wagon in the middle of the back yard he turned to me, put his hand up and said, "Okay, maybe not accidentally."

7.  My husband, 9yo son, 7yo son, 6yo daughter and 4yo daughter headed out to the backyard on Sunday afternoon to throw the football around.  After one particularly bad toss, my 4 yo daughter rolled her eyes at herself and muttered, "LAME." under her breath.

8. I made my daughter a pillow out of soccer ball patterned fleece.  When she saw it she started crying.  "It doesn't look like a soccer ball." she sobbed.  "It looks like an Easter Egg." 

"Listen," I told her.  "I like to run but I'm not the best runner in the world.  I like to cook but I'm not the best cook in the world.  And I like to sew, but I'm not the best sewer in the world.  I like to do a lot of things, but I'm not the best at any of them."

"You're the best mom." she interrupted.

9. Last week while my husband and sons were at football the girls and I made dinner.  We were standing in the kitchen when my 6 year old yelled, "Oh no! Not again! BAT!"

The three of us hit the deck just as the bat entered the kitchen and began circling. 

Someone screamed.  It may have been me.

 "Can you open the door?" I called to my 6yo who was the calmest of us all.  Someone once told me that if you open the door, the bat will find it and leave. 

She crawled over to the door and opened it - too late - the bat had flown back down the hallway.  No matter, my daughters and I went outside to wait.  We held the door wide open.  Yes, there were mosquitoes invading my house but I didn't care.  I was hoping the bat would see them as food.

We were outside for about 5 minutes when my husband and the boys got home.  My husband snagged the bat in a butterfly net on the first try.  He's getting good at this.

Later, as my 6yo is recounting the story to the boys of what happened before they got home she says, "I spotted the bat so I yelled, 'bat' and then mom SCREAMED like a baby and hid under the table and made me unlock the door."

10. I went for a run on Saturday and my ankle didn't hurt!

Ten Things That Have Made Me Laugh Lately

1. Last Friday night I was thrown into Twitter Jail.  I walked out of my office and my husband asked, "What's wrong?" I told him and he said, "Don't get your hopes up."  Apparently he's ALSO aware of what's expected of him in Twitter Jail.

2. My 6 year old daughter got my mediterranean genes (okay, I'm only 25% italian but my husband is PASTY!) and gets extremely tan in the summer.  The other night my husband (a staunch Republican) commented on how brown she'd gotten.  "I may be brown, but I still don't like Barack Obama!" she said.  We all laughed hysterically but I was pretty proud of the fact that she's made it to 6 years old and thinks that the only difference between the races is a healthy application of sun screen

3. It's been HOT here lately.  My home office (i.e. the spare bedroom - which is only spare because the boys and girls share rooms) is about 20 degrees warmer than the rest of the house because I have to keep the door shut to keep the creeps kids out so I've taken to wearing my new sportsbras as shirts.  I just walked into the kitchen and my husband looked at me like he needed something, "Yes?" I asked.  Then I recognized the look he was giving me. "I mean 'No.'" I told him.  He laughed and said, "What do you mean porkchop?"

4. I'm making my sons write stories every day that fill at least one page of an 8.5"x11" notebook. My husband thinks it's summer vacation and I'm mean.  The first day the boys bitched and moaned and called me names and turned in stories that were 5 lines of text with 23 lines of "illustrations."  And then they got into it. Two days ago my oldest wrote a story about alien invaders being repelled by an incumbent army.  In the last paragraph it's revealed that the "alien invaders" are actually microbes and the incumbent army are actually white blood cells!   Take that Mister "It's Summer Can't You Just Leave Them Alone?"

5. I took the kids to the beach today but my husband stayed home to do some yardwork, including shaping some of the shrubbery in our front yard.  We got home late and the kids were exhausted but as we passed by one of the bushes my 4yo glanced up, nodded and said, "Nice Haircut." and kept walking.

6. I shouldn't have laughed but at dinner tonight my 4yo daughter excused herself very politely to go to the bathroom.  She walked down the hall but came back immediately.  I looked at her curiously.  "I thought I had to poop but I just had to toot." she said.

7. We went out for dinner on Friday night to a very old and historic pizzeria in the North End of Boston.  The food was delicious and after a day of walking through the city we were exhausted.  We all sat there in a food coma until my daughter said, "Let's blow this clam shack."

8. Saturday my husband's friend and his new wife met us at the beach for a day of sun and fun.  Then we moved inside for dinner and several drinks. (I was drinking Diet Coke.)  When it was time to leave I took the driver's seat.  My son asked for help buckling his car seat.  My husband reached over the center console from the passenger side.  "I can't get it." he told my son.  "I bet those beers didn't help." my son answered.

9. My sons started football tonight.  My son - who cannot sit still for .3 seconds - listened to the offense and then answered every single question correctly about where the ball was, was supposed to be and where the holes are.  Alle-fucking-luiah I think we finally found something that can match his enthusiasm.

10. My ipad shipped from China.  It is on a 12+ hour flight to California.  I KNOW this and yet I have clicked refresh on the tracking site approximately 75,000 times since it left at 7am this morning.  I am to get to 100,000 because... iPAD. *squee*

 

Ten Things That Made Me Laugh Lately

1. My husband was talking about someone who had lost a limb in war.  My son pointed to a microscopic speck on his leg and bragged, "I have a little scar."  My husband warned him that bragging about a tiny injury may lead to ridicule.  A couple minutes later I left with my son to walk to the bus stop.  My 4 year old yelled out the door after us, "Goodbye mom! Goodbye brother - and your little scar!"

2. My kids have started summer track.  It's a great program run by the high school track coach and high school track participants for kids ages 4-14. There aren't a lot of sports available for children as young as 4 so I'm thrilled to be able to sign all four of my children up.  Practice is from 6-7:30 and the first night I just sat there thinking, "Wow, I could be very productive right now." so last night I dressed in running clothes and ran around the outside of the track while my kids ran sprints.

At one point I was coming around the corner as a group of 7 year old girls lined up to race around the oval.  Some friends of mine were on the sideline so I gestured to the little girls and stage whispered to my friends, "I can take them."  My friends laughed.  I passed the girls.  The whistle blew behind me and they started running.  The SMOKED me.

3. My brother is EXTREMELY cautious.  He's also an accountant - go figure.  A couple of weekends ago we were at the beach and one of the boogie boards started to float away.  My sister said, "Good thing you grabbed that or he (gesturing to my brother) would have had to swim after it."  My brother grunted and said, "Screw that, I would have waved goodbye to it and bought another one."

"Yeah," I added.  "He has more dollars than courage."  He readily agreed.

4. That same weekend at the beach my nephew got in trouble for a couple of things that he did to my son - because my son told on him.  Later in the day my son walked into the kitchen and said to my sister, "He just said a bad word."  My nephew turned to my son and said, "STOP telling on everyone!" 

I turned to my brother and said, "And by everyone he means stop telling on him."

5. A few years ago my husband and I went to an "adult store" in downtown Boston.  A few days later we were visiting my VERY CONSERVATIVE in-laws when my mother in law mentioned a restaurant right across the street from the store we had visited.  "We were just over there." I said.  My husband froze.  "I can't remember why we were there." I told her.  "Honey, Why were we just in Back Bay?"

My husband gave me a look and said, "I don't remember."  "We were JUST there." I insisted.  "Remember? We parked on the bridge and then walked toward the *POW*" I SUDDENLY remembered and became a STAMMERING, SWEATING, PANICKING FOOL.

6. My friend told me that she calls Match.com "ONLIE Dating"

7. My son batted last at his last baseball game of the season.  At his level they don't score "outs" they just have everyone bat and then they switch to the field.  After my son hit the ball he ran around all of the bases and his WHOLE TEAM ran out to home plate to celebrate his crossing home plate.  The smile on his face made my husband tear up.

8. Last night after the last baseball game we brought the kids home, tucked them into bed and then I went to the gym.  There are four elliptical machines and three of them were taken.  I hopped on beside an 80 year old guy who was passing gas like he was the Exxon Valdez.  I could have gotten off the machine but decided that exercising my heart trumped protecting my lungs.

9. The other day I tweeted, "You are Fabulous and anyone who says otherwise is an ASS."  It was retweeted over 100 times.  That's something we all need to hear more often.  You guys rock.

10. Last weekend my husband put the moves on me for one of our Sunday morning quickies - which is basically his way of stalling since it's his turn to get up with the kids but I'll take it.  We did it spooning which is USUALLY one of our favorites but halfway through I realized that it felt like I had a broken hip.  Getting old sucks.

Ten Things That Have Made Me Laugh Lately

1. Last Sunday night I had tucked the boys into bed at 8 and was sitting in my office voraciously finishing the last Harry Potter book.  They both got up at 8:30 and walked into my office for absolutely no reason at all.  Then my 6 year old points to the book, points to my laptop and asks, "Mom, shouldn't you be working to make us more money?"

2. On a related note, my kids never go to bed on the first (five) tries.  Last week several awesome readers sent me a link to this book for parents.  It's HILARIOUS...

3. DH was supposed to chaperone my daughter's class field trip.  He had to be at the school no later than 8:10.  At 7:55 he was still in the bathroom and from the sound of it - he wasn't going to be done any time soon.  I'm not being gross, I could hear the Angry Birds themesong from outside the door. ;)  I called in to him, "You need to be at school in 15 minutes." "Thanks" he called out.  "No problem," I called back.  "I know how time gets away from you in there!"

4. On Thursday morning my 4year old does not have school.  Since I usually work from home, she and my husband and I try to spend some time together.  Last week she walked up to him, wrapped her arms around him and said, "Daddy, I'm going to make you have sap in you." (i.e. make him sappy)

5. "Can we watch a movie tomorrow night?" my 8yo asked on Saturday.  "No" I told him.  "Why?" he asked.  "Because you have SHchool on Monday." I answered slurring the word school.  (I may or may not have been drunk.  I don't actually remember. Which is probably a good indication.) 

As he walked away from me, he turned around so he was almost walking backwards, "SHCHOOL?" he asked. He raised his eyebrows.  "Really? That's what you're going with?"

Question: He's 8.  Can I still legally strap him into a chair?

6. Last week I took a look at some of the search terms that people have used to find my blog and I noticed that one of the top 10 was "Last Shreds of Sanity."  At first I was panicked.  I can barely find MY last shred of sanity.  There's no way I could help all of you find yours.  And then I realized that it actually referred to MY LAST SHRED OF SANITY my friend Shan's blog.  Which makes much more sense.

7.  I'm not the only one in the house with Harry Potter fever lately.  Both of my sons are at least deep into Book 4 and the girls have seen the first 3 movies.  The other day they were running around the first floor casting spells at each other.  I was trying to get them to brush their teeth and all you could hear was "EXPELLIARMUS!" (disarm) or "EXPECTO PATRONUM!" (a protection spell.)  Finally I couldn't take it any more and I yelled, "EXPECTO A SPANKING IF YOU DON'T BRUSH YOUR TEETH!"  They laughed - but they brushed.

8. The air temperature warmed and the clouds parted long enough on Sunday for my daughter's birthday party.  21 Children under the age of 8 and for 90 minutes they decorated t-shirts, played tag, rested in a hammock, chewed on grass and ate cake.  I HAD planned to set up a soccer game but sometimes you just have to realize that unstructured play is the best kind.

9. I ran in a 5k on Sunday morning.  I hoped to finish in under 40 minutes.  I finished in 33 something.  That's the good news.  The bad news? The 8 and 9 year old boys who live around the corner from me beat me - HANDILY.  (By FIVE minutes.)  Their 5 year old brother also ran the race.  THANK GOD for me he took a wrong turn when the 5k and 10k race went separate ways (they found him at the 6k mark) or I may have been REALLY humiliated!

10. One day I was out running and it was INSANELY foggy.  I was running up the street and could barely see the houses on either side of me.  As I was passing the aforementioned neighbor boys' house I glanced over to see the 9 year old dressed in FULL hockey gear standing in front of a goal in his driveway.  There was NO ONE else in sight.  All I could picture was him waiting for some invisible lineman to come skating out of the fog.  It was funny and creepy at the same time.