Of little hands and bottoms

I get the privilege of staying home with my little son and being a full-time mom. Several days a week, I also get to take care of some of his little friends in our home. Overall, I love it. Overall.

Some days I am pulling my hair out. Other days I probably should be pulling my hair out, but I'm laughing too hard. And I'm always pretty thankful when it's one of the latter.

Like today.

 

I have two tired boys who won't take a morning nap, thus demolishing my plans to do some writing and note-taking. But after a quiet time they're not grumpy, so they play nicely for awhile as we listen to cowboy music and I scribble in my notebook. Then I start to get lunch ready. Suddenly, they are the World's Hungriest Toddlers, trying to eat everything from raw carrots and celery out from underneath my chopping knife to cheerios they found on the floor to the chocolate chips they spy on the counter.

Chicken and veggie potpie is finally in the oven and we go out to the living room to play. One of the boys loves cars and tractors, so I grab a cookie sheet and make a ramp with a wooden stool. I'm going to be like one of those awesome mom bloggers who comes up with these creative ideas for playing with her children.

Well, little boys may love trucks and cars but intuition doesn't always equal smarts. Both of them were interested in the ramp, but more for sitting on then for rolling their vehicles down. I caught myself saying, "What part of 'block the road' do you not understand?" while laughing as I removed yet another little bum from the sheet pan ramp.

They eventually figured it out and we had some fun races down the ramp. Their favorite was loading all five of the vehicles we had onto the sheet pan all at once so they could race down together. They never did get that if they sat at the end of the ramp, the tractors wouldn't actually race...they'd just stop. I'd have 4 innocent eyes blinking up at me after a pileup saying quite plainly, "I didn't know that would happen."

Then I got this inspiration. If I got all my sheet pans, we could make a road! Then I could actually blog about it! You know...one of those "Activities for a Rainy Day" blogs that gets pinned a million times.

So we made a sheet pan road and I started showing my son's friend how to drive his tractor on it. He sat there, on top of a sheet pan, banging the tractor up and down, when I turned to see if my son might get it. And there he sat, calmly holding a sheet pan and banging it against his head.

I couldn't stop laughing.

Enter lunch. In spite of their ravaging earlier, neither child would eat a single thing I put in front of them. My rascal burned his tongue on a piece of chicken and spent the rest of the meal blowing on the food on his fork and saying, "Hot, hot," while tapping it with his hand to test the temperature, eating about 5 bites in total. His friend ate about the same amount, scrunching up his nose at everything I tried to give him. I eventually caved and handed him his bottle, but even that merely started getting dumped on his tray.

That's when a mom says, "The end. Nap time."

And now they sleep. And I write. And laugh about ideals and silly little boys that know nothing about mom blogs.

Enjoy the moments. They won't last forever.