Children teach you so much...

There are a few things that I have learned since becoming a mother that I think will always be true no matter how old my children are. However, I became a mother upon saying "I do" so, some may of these tidbits could also have come from marriage...in my life the line is blurry.

1. No matter what you ask for, you will get the opposite. For the first 2 years that we have been in our house, I have begged for the toilet paper to be put on the roll (don't we all wish for this?). It was never, ever put on the roll...we were always chasing it around the floor, fishing it out of the sink or (heaven forbid) the toilet, and eventually I would be the one to put the nearly gone toilet paper in its place. I hoped for this task to be accomplished every day, that is until Fuss realized that pulling on the roll of toilet paper was a great way to make a mess! He is delighted by the way it flies through the air on to the ground, where he can tear it into little, tiny, annoying pieces. Now, I have asked everyone to please NOT put the toilet paper on the roll and to keep it out of Fuss' reach. So, now everytime I go into the bathroom, I have to take the toilet paper off the roll and set it on the counter...where they used to leave it.

2. Children imitate their parents...even the things you wished they didn't notice. Since trying to lose the extra weight that I so easily added, I have been weighing myself weekly. The other day while I was in the shower, Fuss came trapsing through the bathroom and straight into my closet (where he normally plays with my shoes). A few seconds later he comes waltzing back out with the scale in his hand, and continued out of the bathroom into my bedroom. I heard him place the scale on the floor, and a couple of seconds later I heard him whimper and cry a little. Then he proceeded back to the closet with scale in hand...and I totally understand, if I had nearly quadrupled my weight in 14 months I would be pretty upset too!

3. Children understand more than you think they do, but they try to get away with pretending that they don't. We have a mini-refrigerator that we purchased when we lived with D's parents (while our house was being built). It has been sitting in our basement since we moved in just over 2 years ago. Olie has begged for us to let him put it in his room, and finally I have given in. He was so excited that when Nana took them to the dollar store (their favorite place) Olie purchased a box of baking soda for the little fridge as his treat. We did, however, tell him that we were going to set some guidelines. Since he wants to be treated more like an adult, I had him write up some rules that he thought were fair for us to go over. After much deliberation, he told D and I that he had decided that it would be fair if he were to pay for all items that were in the fridge in his room. He would only purchase healthy snacks, a small amount of chocolate, and non-caffinated drinks or water. He explained that since he was paying for them, if his brothers wanted a soda out of his fridge then he would make them buy one from him (seemed fair). Then he broke it down for us...since a 12 pack of soda is around $5, and there are 3 of them, each could have 4 cans of soda from each pack that was bought. So, Olie decided that he would charge his brothers $.75 for a can of soda (from the fridge he was borrowing from us)...that would cover the cost of the soda. He told us this plan so innocently that it almost made us think that it hadn't been thought through that he would be making $6 off of his brothers so that all of his sodas were free for him, plus he earned himself a little extra. As I asked him if he had purchased a business license for his little money-making-scheme, he grinned sheepishly...he knew exactly what he was doing. So, when he asked for a glass of milk, I told him "$1 please."