Squeaky clean

Forgive me.  This is gross.  You don't have to read any further....

Marcus is very mobile.  I have to keep the half bath door closed when he is 'loose' in the house because he loves to stand up at the toilet.  Today, I heard him crawling in that direction but it didn't really register right away.  A few seconds later I realized where he was headed and thought I should check to make sure the door was closed.

Jumping up and running in there, I discovered that it wasn't... and that he was already standing up with his hands on the toilet seat.  AND, if that wasn't bad enough! he had a wet wad of toilet paper in his hands (yes, that's right!...  The last 'person' hadn't flushed-thankfully it was urine only, but still... eww!)  At this point, since everything immediately goes in his mouth, I can only assume that the urine soaked wad has already been there -- double eww.

So, I pick him up scraping his hand free of toilet paper.  Then I bring him to the sink, turn the water on and squirt soap onto his hand.  During the one second that I let go of his hands to check the water temp, he puts his soapy hand in his mouth, thus solving the dilemma of how to clean out his mouth.  It wouldn't have been the method I'd have chosen, but as I rinsed the bubbles out of his mouth, I figured it was probably pretty effective!

Basketball Art

Today, Zach presented Steve with this:

(It's crumpled because Marcus got a hold of it.)

Confession

I am not smart enough to be homeschooling my children.  It's true.  I'm not looking for affirmation, compliments or advice.  I've accepted it, for the most part.

Today I had to call Steve and ask him how I was suppose to teach Zach to solve a math problem (he's only in kindergarten; we're not even to the hard stuff yet).  I was, and still am, stumped.

Zach has been doing really well with addition and subtraction.  He has been solving problems by getting a number to 10; for instance 6+7 becomes (6+4)+3.  He is understanding the concepts and moving quickly through the book.  We have slowly gotten to more difficult problems and today we were presented with this:  

It looks like the book wants him to start with 10, take away 6 and then add it to the remainder (in this case, 1) to get 5; it would look like 10-6+1=5.  So that's how I was teaching him, but of course he is getting confused by the fact that we are doing subtraction and then addition to get the answer.  By the time we get to this problem I start to doubt myself and call Steve:

We proceed to have a discussion about which makes more sense: to do 10-9+8 or 18-8-1.  And then I think, "THIS IS KINDERGARTEN MATH!!!!  I SHOULDN'T ALREADY BE HAVING THIS TROUBLE!"  I arrive at the brilliant conclusion that we will skip math today and I will write a blog about it instead.

Future head banger

Over the weekend Marcus started 'dancing' to music.  I think he gets his coordinated moves from Steve.

Not the hairy one

At dinner tonight we were talking about babies and I told Eli that I had 3 babies.  I pointed to Marcus and said that he was my baby, then Eli and then Zach.

Me: "See, I have 3 babies!"

Zach: "No, mom. You have 4 babies."

Me:  "I didn't give birth to that hairy one!" (referring to Tek)

Zach: "Not the hairy one, I mean the bald one!"