Never know what to expect!

My nine year old daughter, Double A, came to me the other night and said "after you put Bumblebee to bed I need to talk to you about something." Now, many of you don't know Double A like I do. She NEVER wants to talk about something other than Taylor Swift and horses and dessert and there is no build up for those conversations...they flow out unbidden. Double A is quite reclusive about discussing weighty topics or feelings. So you can imagine my surprise and worry stemming from this statement.

Bumblebee was in bed and I went in to discuss this topic of unknown origin. She looked close to tears and I thought we were on the edge of a "Santa isn't real" or a "how do you make a baby" conversation. My heart was racing with dread and Husband #1 was not home for backup. This is what I got: "Sometimes some pee comes out before I know it, even when I don't have to go pee." At this point she is about to burst out in tears for reasons I cannot understand and I am about to burst out in laughter and say "If you think it is bad now, you are soooo doomed! You haven't even had a baby yet!" But see above where I mentioned possible conversation topics. I wisely steered clear of my outburst and rationally began asking her a stream (see what I did there with that pun) of "medical" questions. (I am not a doctor but I play a doctor's wife in real life. This qualifies me for absolutely nothing medical but for some reason, people seem to think it does.)

After assessing this issue with all of my non-existent medical knowledge, I determine she has no problem other than she needs to go to the bathroom sooner. She does not perceive this to be the problem so I (again) wisely refrain from dismissing her with this corrective action in hand. We discuss at length how your body needs fluid and you need to pee more than twice per day. This morphs into color and smell of pee, bladder and kidney infections, etc. We develop a plan for drinking more water at school and regular bathroom trips whether she "has to go" or not. She seemed happy with this resolution. I was happy she was happy and that she actually felt comfortable enough to talk to me about this since it was obviously a very big deal to her.

There are just some things no one ever tells you will have to do as a parent. Along with "catching someone else's vomit in your own cupped hands" and "inserting a suppository in your one year old in an airport bathroom", discussing color and smell of urine with a nine year old is one that "What to Expect When You Are Expecting" neglected to mention.

Slinkies and Straw Wrappers

So there are two things I hate about my kids' childhood. Or at least just two things I am prepared to discuss in this post. Stick with me here...this is not one of those deeply heartfelt posts about how I hate the fact I cannot spend nearly enough time with my wittle pwecious babies and am missing so much! Nope, nothing sweet like that! This post is about Slinkies and straw wrappers! See! So much more fun to read about than my deep and abiding love for my children and how I cannot fathom a life without them. Because even though I am technically a "mommy blogger" I am not THAT type of mommy blogger (or really even much of a blogger at all).

First off, the Slinky. Hate them, have never understood them and still don't get how someone, somewhere, got this hoax of a "toy" produced...and it is still produced!! They somehow appear in our house. I don't know from whence they come, but good golly do they ever come. They come in all colors and sizes, too... rainbow slinkies, traditional silver slinkies, slinkies that can fit around your wrist, slinkies that can fit around your finger. WHY? I don't get it. I have never once been able to get a slinky to go down more than one stair step. Were the stairs much shallower when this sucker was invented? I cannot get the slinky to "walk" using its own momentum or whatever the heck it is supposed to do. So, they show up here in the house, unbidden, only to become immediately tangled. Then I have an upset child who, from some reason, thinks this toy is the be all and end all of all toys they have. I THEN have to devote the next twenty minutes trying to unravel the stupid thing. They are never the same after unraveling. They always have some weird bend or kink left in them. But really, what does it matter, they never worked to begin with.


Second bane of my existence: juice pouch or drink box straw wrappers. Hate them with a passion and if they weren't so darn convenient for outings and barbecues they would be banned from our house entirely. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't hate them for the purpose they were invented (unlike the Slinky), covering the straw. I just hate what they become...useless, almost invisible but not quite, trash that ends
up with a weird stickiness and you find in the oddest places. I think they have some force field built in that makes them polar opposite magnets to trash cans. They just never seem to make it in the trash. I have found these things everywhere. And best off all, they end up in two pieces! So you have double the straw wrappers than you have drinks. More fun for your money! I guess it is their near invisibility that makes it just so dang hard for my kids to get these wrappers within five feet of a trash can. Or it's their total disregard for who has to clean up after them. I bet they don't bio-degrade for a gazillion years and generations from now when Wall-E comes to earth to clean it up because we ruined it, he will have the stupid straw wrappers stuck to his robot treads and get all gooped up in there and he will shut down and die a sad robot death...all because my kids had a juice box.