My husband and I often joke that God made little kids so cute to keep us from tossing them out the window. I don't know how things go down at your house, but that certainly holds true when I just spent the last 30 minutes cleaning the kitchen and wiping the patio door only to have a kid come dump his bowl of blueberries all over the floor, stomp on them and then go stick their sticky palms all over the door when I
Anyway, when I'm done picking up squished blueberries from the floor and wiping fresh fingerprints off the glass, I look out on the patio and see that little stinker walking around in his "toadies" and using a stick to chase the ants. He follows one around, tries to poke it, then heads off after another, talking to them as if they were his best friends. He catches me watching him, looks up, and gives me a wave and that goofy grin that makes me forget all about the rotten apple core I found in the laundry basket earlier that week.
Cutie patootie. He probably just thought "laundry basket" was a distant cousin of "waste basket." An understandable error.
Come to think of it, there are plenty of cute things that kids do that are actually pretty gross when you really think about it.
1. Announce and describe their bathroom behaviors
One kid has developed a habit of providing play-by-play commentary when he goes to the bathroom. It could be titled "Adventures in Defecation." He will come out of his room at 4:30 in the morning and quietly close the door behind him, only to stand in the hallway and yell at the top of his lungs, "I NEED TO GO POOOOP!" Then after we yell back in our bleary voices to go ahead and go for crying out loud, he waits a couple minutes before announcing, "Mommy! Daddy! I got a LOT of poops! Dat's a BIG poop! Oh boy, dat's a DADDY poop!" Adorable? Yes. Disgusting? Absolutely. Next thing you know, I'm laughing in my sleep.
2. Sneeze
I have three kids who all sneeze in very different, yet very cute ways. Isaiah scrunches up his nose like a bunny with allergies before sneezing with a very textbook "Achoo!" When Thomas sneezes, it's like a kitten snuck up on a chipmunk. But Micah....his sneezes attack him. He will let loose three to five sneezes in a row, each one ripping through his entire body like a lightning bolt and shooting snot and spit all over the place as if someone had stuck their thumb over the opening of a garden hose and suddenly released it. Sometimes he looks like a pirate after he sneezes. There have been times when Micah has sneezed and I have turned around to find him wide-eyed and screaming, panicking as he tries to find a Kleenex to wipe away the snot that is currently hanging down below his chin. Is it wrong that sometimes I just watch the show for my own entertainment instead of pointing out the Kleenex box?
3. Pulling out baby teeth
We all get excited about this, don't we? I remember one particularly stubborn tooth I had as a kid that I could actually spin around in my mouth without it detaching. If I had yanked even just a little bit, the root would have let go, but I took a sick pleasure in spinning that tooth with my tongue. Our oldest has lost four teeth now, the most recent just tonight. At breakfast this morning, he would put his finger on top of it and pull it so far forward that it hung out like a saber-tooth tiger tusk. And he was ecstatic. And when he yanked it out of his mouth later, leaving a gaping bloody hole behind, we all smiled and cheered and high-fived while he soaked up the blood with a tissue. See? Super-cute yet super-gross.
4. Burping and Farting
Admittedly, this one might be more of an issue in my house considering that I have three stinky sons running around. When a belch sneaks up on them in the middle of dinner, it explodes out of their mouth like a cannon and they immediately bust out laughing. We remind them to say "Excuse me," of course, but they don't hear us because they are too busy basking in the afterglow of their gastrointestinal foghorn blast. And then there is the farting. Doggonit, I just can't help it but it's freaking cute when my kid is just trying to pick up his toys and it sounds like the entire tuba section of the Wisconsin Marching Band got drunk and moved into his butt.
5. Naked Time
This part is going to get a little weird because I need to choose my words carefully here so that I don't inadvertently add a bunch of search terms to my content that would attract the super-creepy weirdos to the blog. I've got enough problems, thankyouverymuch. So, again I would like to remind you that I have BOYS. All boys. When they get it in their sweet little heads to go au naturale, there is precisely zero I can do about it....because my husband eggs them on and because their little tushies are just so freaking cute. Once, I got a photo of one of my kids doing a back-bend turned flip over the arm of the couch in this particular state. And then there was the time THIS happened:
Classic and totes adorbs. That is, until they sit on my lap and I smell a little something-something an I realize that a sub-par wipe job from an escapade related to #1 on this list just took place and suddenly I find myself wanting to burn my clothes, get new furniture, and take a nap until my kids are grown-ups.
So, yeah. They're cute little boogers, but they are freaking disgusting. If I hadn't really wanted to get into the living room at a reasonable hour to be able to watch an episode of Friday Night Lights on Netflix, I probably could have come up with more.
But I'd love to hear your stories! Any tales of adorable/grossness to share?
