You Can’t Deny The Logic

 

I just have this thing right now about going through my old journals.  There are too many experiences in there that I don’t want to forget and remind me why I laughed so much as a Mom with 7 kids.  I am also reminded why I cried as well.  I did some of that today as I read some of their painful experiences.  I hope that they recover from those, because they still make me cry.

But today, here are some of the entries that made me laugh,

March 2000

I was cleaning out a pile of papers on the mudroom floor today. 

They happened to be Dallin’s (14)  school papers he’d dumped there.  I found a “Fall Music Theory Final Exam”.  Part of the exam had a list of musical terms to be defined. 

For the question, “The order of flats”, my brilliant son had written, “The highest honor a flat could possibly receive . . .”

I laughed every time I thought about that during the day.  The band director had written the correct answer in, which of course is B, E, A, D, G, C, F and then had written, “Creative", but not correct”, with a smiley face. 

I wonder if she got as much of a laugh out of that as I did.

April 2000

Aubrey (9) came home from school with a dollar bill yesterday.  She wasn’t sure if she should keep it.  When I asked her how she acquired it, she kind of smiled and said she won it in a bet. 

“What kind of bet was that?” I asked.

“Well, I told a boy at recess that my Dad was an alien.  He didn’t believe me.  He said he would bet me $750 that he wasn’t.  We went and talked to the recess teacher and I told her he was a resident alien from Canada.  The teacher said that was right.”

The boy didn’t have $750 on him, so he paid her the first installment.

I told her she better take it back and not bet again.

 

April 2000

Last night Jamie (3) started to cry and begged me to put her to bed.  Believe it or not, she often begs to be put to bed. I took her up and got her into her pajamas, brushed her teeth then said, “You need to say your prayers.” 

She knelt down and I waited for her to start.  She put her face in her hands on the bed and just lay there.  Finally, I asked her what she was doing.  She said, “I’m praying like you do . . .”

“Did you say anything while you were laying there?

“No”.

“Well, Jamie, when you see Mommy like that, she’s talking to Heavenly Father, you just can’t hear it.”

She apparently thought I just lay there and took a nap.

 

May 2000

Tonight I had to take Marci over to the school for the kindergarten orientation for parents and new kindergartners.

 

I couldn’t believe how worried Marci got as she heard them talking about expectations.

She leaned over and said, “I don’t know how to write the letters that are curvy . . .”  ( lower case). 

“That’s OK, we’ll work on that.”

“I don’t know how to read . . .”

“That’s OK, that’s why you go to school . . .”

She finally had had enough of expectations and went to sleep under the table.

 

September 2000

I went in to see what Marci(6) and Jamie (4) were up to in the bonus room. 

They had taken the cushions off the dark blue couch and with chalk had written all over the fabric where the cushions had been.  They had written their names and just plain old BIG graffiti all over.

I gasped, then said, “How COULD you?  How could you write all over the couch?”

Marci put her head down, and Jamie sitting there looked up at me, wrinkled her nose and said very softly, “Well, it was really easy . . .”