Oh these children of mine, they just fill my heart. And 95% of the time it’s with love and happiness! We shall not talk about the other 5% of the time.

I lied –  because what am I if not an over-sharer?!

This past week was spirit week at the kid’s school. Monday was Sports Day, Tuesday was Mis-Match Day, Wednesday was School Spirit Day and yesterday was Character Day. I had been talking to the kids all week long about Character Day- where you get to dress in your favorite character. We have a few odd costumes laying around and I was more than willing to help them put something new together if they wanted. All week they told me they had it under control and it was all good. I knew darn well that was a lie, but was too busy to really concern myself with it.

Character Day arrived yesterday and, to no one’s surprise, the kids had nothing in mind and were freaking out. Always the one to look for the easy way out, I told them they were going to baseball players (what..they are characters!) because lord knows we have enough baseball paraphernalia to clothe a team in my house. All was more or less fine (read: each kid only cried once while getting dressed) until it was time for them to figure out what hat they were each going to wear. Mind you, we have at least 7 baseball hats in my house, but they each wanted to wear the same one. Because, of course they did.

Cue the meltdown of epic proportions from each kid (Scorch: it’s my hat. Bean: I called it first. Lather, rinse, repeat) until I finally said no one is going to wear a hat. Period. Which went over really, really well. I hustled my sobbing, pissed off kids out the door and 2 seconds later Bean ran back in while I was putting my shoes on to tell me Scorch agreed she could wear the hat, so we can bring them both. Clearly I was born yesterday because I believed her only to find out the little shit was lying when Scorch promptly lost his mind when she climbed into the car wearing the hotly debated hat.

We drove to school with the volume on the radio turned up to the max just so I didn’t have to hear them anymore. It’s pretty clear my parenting style is both mature and understanding.

Thankfully the hat decision was decided by a few heated thumb wars and peace was restored by the time I left school. As our beloved crossing guard likes to day, yesterday was a day that called for day drinking.

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Earlier this week on Mis-Match Day, the kids decided to dress as each other. Bean had on jeans, a button down shirt and a tie. We pinned her hair up and called it a day. Scorch decided to wear a dress (over his shirt and jeans) and a beautiful pink barrette to school. The kids thought this was hysterical (as did I) and they wore their clothes proudly all day (barrette included!).

Flash forward to Wednesday night when Scorch got home from ski club. He was in the bathroom getting undressed and I realized he never took off his school clothes- he just put his long johns, sweatpants and ski pants over what he had on. He did the same thing for his top half. That meant he had on 4 layers on his bottom half and 7 layers on his top. While I appreciate the need to be warm, I asked why he hadn’t changed first?

Oh, I didn’t think of that.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

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Last night as I was putting the kids to bed, I told the Bean I loved her. Her reply? Not as much as I love eating boogers!

The end.