12 Things I Learned This Week, Vol 148

And, here we go again…

Lesson #1: When your toddler decides to take the shirt of her Corolle doll with the teeny tiny neck and great big head, she gets an early preview of what childbirth is like.

Lesson #2: You can spend a bunch of time perfecting your Fantasy Football team each week, or you can never even look at it and go undefeated the first three weeks.

Lesson #3: There’s one person in our house who thinks packing up her purse and kids, then pushing a shopping cart through a sea of grumpy people is actually fun. She’s three.

Lesson #4: Some people dream of white picket fences. Pink? She dreams of, well, pink ones.

Lesson #5: My girl is a natural copywriter with a gift for spin. She’s given our house a lovely and spirited name, “Fruitti Tutti”. You know, since people toot in our house a lot.

Lesson #6: As a parent, you really have to be patient and listen to both sides of a sibling argument. For instance, the other day, Pink shouted, “Little’s going to throw his Z-bar at my face.” He defended his honor, “No!” Of course he wouldn’t, I thought. Then he clarified, “It’s not a Z-bar. It’s a Cliff bar!” See? There was no reason for his sister to be so upset.

Lesson #7: If you ask Pink, all the flash cards in our house say, “My mommy loves me so much. And my daddy loves me so much. And I love my brothers so much.” And, if you ask me, that’s all she really needs to know right now anyway.

Lesson #8: While it might seem the driver gets left out since you can’t see the movie playing in the backseat on a long car ride, with Pink, that’s not a concern. I got the entire play by play of Tangled. And Rapunzel’s mom is really, really mean.

Lesson #9: As my kids get older, I’m having to create rules I never even imagined. Like, “Your friends can never remove their socks in my car. Ever.” Unfortunately, some of Big’s friends aren’t so into following rules.

Lesson #10: When you sit next to the bad boy in kindergarten, you learn some rather questionable lessons. Including bad words. At dinner this week, Little shared that the F-word is “freakin”, the B-word is “butt”, and the H-word is “handsome”. Yikes, I never knew that complimenting my boys all these years was so offensive.

Lesson #11: While Pink might not seem like the competitive type, all evidence from our Saturday suggests otherwise. Not to be outdone by Big getting 2 strikeouts in the inning he pitched, and Little scoring 3 goals in his soccer game, she made 5—yes, 5—visits to the field’s porta-potties. Forget soccer, I’m getting a bumper sticker declaring my awesomeness as an Outhouse Mom.

Lesson #12: If Little really wanted to learn some bad words, he should have stayed up late enough to watch UCLA get upset by Utah last night.

You win some, you lose some. And that, my friends, is the freakin’ truth. So get out there and be awesome this week—win or lose. (Just don’t be handsome.)