Rugrats and Dirty Rugs

Denial is a powerful thing. I say that to myself a lot. Probably because I make use of denial often. Like, for instance, when I hear crackling coming from the kitchen and even get a whiff of smoke, I will still tell myself that the kitchen could not possibly be on fire. I was sitting in the living room writing. I was quite distracted and really into my imaginary world. So, when Grumpy wanted lunch, I told him to go ahead and make himself something to eat. He decided to make Ramen noodles. He filled a pot of water, turned on the stove, and went downstairs to continue his playacting and mouth noises. After a while, I came out of the world of my own making to hear crackling. I thought maybe there was a bit of dried food getting crusted over even more or maybe there was a bit of water that was reacting to the heat. I told Grumpy that maybe he should go into the kitchen and make sure the stove wasn't on fire. He ran up the stairs and stopped dead in his tracks. "The stove...

During Sunday School hour yesterday, I was going over a particular verse with Sleepy. I wanted him to memorize it and so we worked on it together for a while. During this time, I kept hearing, "Why do I have to do this? I'm only six." After repeating the same verse over and over, I asked, "Do you want to do it again?" to which he scrunched up his face, thought about it, and replied, "Why don't we wait until I grow up?" Imp. (I am also proud to say that I ended up with nothing revolting-looking smeared all over my face. My husband did keep a close eye on that for his accident-prone wife. At one point during the day, though, he brought me one of the earrings that I had been wearing. It was found on the floor and someone had picked it up and asked him about it. Of course, he knew who's earring it was and patiently brought it to me. So, for a little while there, I was wearing only one earring.)

A few nights ago, I had a dream. Actually, it was more like a nightmare. In it, our whole family was staying in one motel room with the dog. (This has actually happened in real life, although we only had three kids at the time.) In my "dream", we were getting ready to leave when we noticed the smell of dog poop. When we investigated, we found a horse pile of dog poop up against the wall under the heater. Doc took one look at it and announced that he wasn't cleaning it up. He was going to leave it for the motel cleaning ladies to deal with it. I was in agreement. I wasn't going near it. I just shrugged and said, "She's your dog." So, as we finished packing up, we all had to deal with the horrendous stench filling the small room. Crinkling up my nose, I took a bag and began filling it with the toys that had been strewn all over the room. I picked up toy after toy. There were toys in the corners, under the beds, and under the blankets and pillows. In fact,...

There comes a time when it's not my kids that give me the blog fodder. Yep. Yours truly has provided the tale this time. Yesterday, some very nice people asked me to take some flowers home with me. Due to the lack of space in our seven passenger car, the flowers were relegated to sitting on my lap. Since they were blocking my view and taking up quite a bit of space, we opted to hand them over to a nice couple that Doc was going to spend a few minutes with at their house. After Doc safely handed the flowers to me in the car, he went around and got in the driver's seat. I turned to look at him as he said something and as he saw my face, the man actually recoiled from me in horror. "What is that all over your chin?!" he exclaimed wildly. My forehead scrunched in confusion and I whipped open the mirror above me. I started in horror as well when I saw smears of something that looked like ketchup all over my chin. "Oh! It must be pollen from the flowers!"...