Seriously, is there anything better than that first sip of hot, french vanilla-laced coffee? With all the busyness around here this morning, I'm just now sitting down with my mug, though you could call what I'm doing gulping, not sipping. So its Day 2 of Back-to-School week and it hit me this morning in a flash of "ohmygod, what do their teachers think of me?!" that in all the craziness yesterday, I completely forgot to trim and clean my boys long, filth-encrusted fingernails and do their ears with q-tips! Oh man, you would not believe how bad my 6 year old's nails were. *shudder* Imagine if you will, the nails of a little boy who has went camping 4-5 times this summer, dirt-biking double that amount, plus all the nose-picking, butt-scratching (and who knows where else got scratched *SHUDDER*) and general gross-ness that is little boys... and you truly know my horror. I'd like to tell you that I'm the type of mom who is always on top of that sort of thing, but hey. It was summer and with four rambunctious kids, grooming them took the back burner to feeding and cleaning up after them. My mom told us once that when she was in elementary school, there was this girl who had the most disgusting dirty fingernails and how she could never bring herself to make friends with the girl because of it (for mom, dirty fingernails = lowest of the low, and you do not want to even KNOW what she thinks of long fingernails or toenails on men! lol). So I had that going through my head this morning too -- "Ohgod, I've probably deprived my boy of potential friends and they all think he's a beast!" I also did his ears and that probably traumatized me more than the fingernails. We call ear-cleaning 'getting the potatoes out of your ears' and I'm pretty sure I cleaned out a whole field of them from in there! With maybe a few turnips as well.
Poor Ardan (my 6 year old) also has a wart on his right pointer-finger, I've given it a name - "Stubborn Bastard", or SB for short. We tried the dandelion milk thing this summer but for some weird reason all the dandelions around here were extinct or something (eradicated by the neighbors' evil pesticide) so it was more like "Honey, stop the vehicle, I see a dandelion", "I can't you crazy woman, we're on Highway 2!", "Oh". For those of you who don't know, dandelion 'milk' is awesome for getting rid of warts. When I was a kid, my little brother's fingers were infested with them, we're talking like 3-5 warts per finger and most of them were on his cuticles. Being a self-absorbed teen, I took no notice (or care) until one sprouted up on MY finger, my thumb actually, and then it was like total catastrophe. I was going through this "I-want-to-be-a-botanist-when-I-grow-up" phase where I rented like 20 books on various herbs, plants, etc (even started my own little greenhouse in my room) and I had read that dandelion milk was used in the old days for warts. So it became me and my brother's personal mission to pluck every single dandelion on our acreage, and milk those warts to death. What you do is pluck the dandelion right under the head and squeeze and a huge drop of milk comes out, put it on the wart, let it dry, then repeat like ten times, every day. Eventually the wart turns black and falls off. In a couple weeks, we were both wart-free.
But the thing with wart removal is, you must be COMMITTED and you must REMEMBER. You have to remember every day, sometimes a couple times a day, to put the medicine on. And you have to remember to let it dry before you put the bandaid on (that's crucial, I've found). So with all this required remembering, its no wonder SB stuck around. You see, my short-term memory is almost non-existent. You don't believe me? Fine, I'll admit a shameful secret: on occasion I've had to rename my children "Number One", "Number Two" (you get the idea) because my mind goes blank and I find myself calling them by my brothers' names, or getting their names mixed up (which completely horrifies them). I'm pretty sure I've got SB licked this time though. (Okay, that just brought up a visual... *shudder*). My DH (Darling Hubby) brought home the wart-freezing system and I froze that SB back into hell where it came from. Its days are numbered.
Anyway, I just now happened to look over and spotted the baby toddling around with his cheeks bulging and a hand full of cat food. *shaking my head* All I can say is, typical.....
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