Big Kids Are Boring

Recently, I was thinking about the fact that I don't write much on the blog anymore. It's not necessarily because I don't have the time. Come on, 5 kids, full-time teaching, sometimes mother-runner and part-time baker leaves me plenty of time in a day for leisurely writing. (Where is my sarcasm font??) All kidding aside, it's not lack of free time that stops me from writing. It's because my kids are big now. And big kids are boring. First of all, I have to refrain from embarrassing my middle-schoolers since most of their friends follow me on Instagram. And secondly, big kids just don't get into the same kind of shenanigans that they did when they were toddlers. I'm lacking blog fodder. So I thought.

Sophie has this toy she loves called BunchEms. They're basically colorful Velcro balls that have little hooks on them so they can be stuck together in interesting ways. They remind me of those awful things the boys used to throw at us on the way home from school that would stick to our wool knee socks.

These are BunchEms...

...and these are the stupid burrs that the boys would peg at the girls when we were walking home from elementary school. Basically, the same design.

Now, we know these BunchEms can stick to each other, but they'll also stick to anything else. Charlotte's friend, Charlotte, put a bunch of them in her gorgeously long hair. It took Charlotte's mom and I quite a while to pull each one out.

Which leads me to my first story in ages about my ridiculous kids. Charlotte and Sophie decided to take a bath in the big jacuzzi tub. While they were in there, minding their own business, my other darling children decided it would be fun to chuck ice cubes over the shower curtain into the tub. (There's no torture quite like being one of five children.) I put a stop to the ice cube throwing. But, instead of saying "Don't throw anything into the tub," I said, "Don't throw ice into the tub." I should know better by now. Rookie mistake.

Someone, who has yet to own up to it, threw all of Sophie's BunchEms into the tub. Sophie and Charlotte didn't seem to mind. And continued washing their hair with all those little stickers floating around in the water. Charlotte basically washed her hair with them. Which is how this exchange happened between me and the other Charlotte's mom:

 As Anne was texting me, I was sending her the picture...

Poor Chuck. After spending 20 minutes trying to disentangle those stupid things, I was finally left with this clump completely stuck to the middle of the top of her head. They were totally embedded. So I chopped the entire chunk off. Luckily, it didn't end up looking too bad. She has some short hairs on the top of her head, but they're just long enough that they blend in pretty well. 

The lesson here is this: These fools might not be ridiculous as often as when they were toddlers, but, they're still going to keep me on my toes.

~Lissie