Kids, Poop, Love

I love my children.  I love watching them unfold into their unique and interesting selves.

My first-born, Kinsey, has completely amazed me with her self-motivation.  I never have to remind her to study, she just does.  She has decided she wants to be a 4.0 student so she can get a scholarship and choose her collage.  I have loved witnessing this drive in her.  Hanging her towel up?  We're still working on that.



My boys haven't tapped into their scholastic genius just yet, but they have their own spectacular qualities.

Noah is happy.  He loves everyone and expects that they should love him too.  Noah makes friends with total unabashed ballsiness.  It takes him a millisecond to make a new friend in any public forum.  Meet them, invite himself into their home, borrow their toys...

Bailey is loaded with cleverness and wit.  He's fast on his intellectual feet.  His humor is often beyond his years, as is his reflection.  He's my chess-player when it comes to life.  He understands how one move will effect the next ten.  EXCEPT when he has an impulse.  Then it's all out the window (including himself, unfortunately).  

They are beautiful, miracles, undeserved gifts.  They are good... except when they're not.

When a baby (Elliott in this example) is born, he is an unmarred, innocent little creature.  Totally helpless, dependent on my mercies and foresight.  I knew that, along with his undeniable baby cuteness, he would also cry, drool, wake at unpleasant hours, and poop.  That's what babies do.  They poop.  We prepare ourselves for it.  We set up elaborate changing tables, buy diaper genies, wipe warmers, and monkey butt ointments... It grosses us out, but, something about them being 'ours', makes their poop tolerable.  And, we know that, eventually, they will potty-train, and these poopy days will just be one of our parental badges of honor.

What we may not have prepared ourselves for is the kid-poops (both literal and figurative).  There's the unflushed toilets, missed all-together toilets, t.p. mishaps, clogged toilets, and, of course, the frantic, "mom! my lego man fell in the toilet!!".  And that's all the pre-puberty crap.  (eh he.. see what I did there?)

But, I think it may be the figurative poops which catch us the most off-guard.  Wet towels on the floor, crayons in the laundry, the half-eaten yogurt stashed behind the lava lamp, poorly planned bug collections, open-mouthed chewing, complete disregard of privacy needs, ungratefulness, selective hearing impairment, door slamming, the crumbs scattered in my bed, the lack of "my" anything...  Please feel free to add to this list (it would be good to hear that it's not just my kids).

And, for some reason, other baby's poops seem to stink even more.  Here-in lies a primary obstacle for blended families... particularly of the Cherklee genre.  Klee described it well once.  He said it's like waking up with amnesia and being told, "here, this is your family, now love it."  Poop and all...

But I guess that's a core characteristic of love; knowing we all poop, it all stinks; loving anyway.  Being loved anyway...

Jar Pennies

*Clink**Clink*

Adding pennies to our jar

On the quest for

our new home...

The flowers mark our savings.  They have to climb all the way to the top right-hand corner.  Can't wait to see where this leads!

The Latest Dish

So, one of the things I love about Klee is his creative spark.  It's fun to be with someone who appreciates a good project like I do.  He embraces my eclectic flair, and contributes a great deal of his own.

As a chef, Klee has completely altered my relationship with food.  The man is an artist.  I mean, he needs his own spot on the Food Network, complete with cult following.  And, frankly, I deserve a cajones medal for even attempting to cook for him.  Fortunately, he still appreciates a good "kick ass" cottage cheese loaf, tater tot casserole, or stone soup.  (I mean, really, who doesn't?)

The kitchen here at Belmont Cottage is not chef-worthy by any means, and is lacking in certain basics for meal prep... like dishes.  When Klee came to join us, this dish deficit became more apparent.  Being financially challenged, buying a new dish set was not an option.  Hence, we decided to start our dish project, and it has been fabulous!

We have been piecing our collection together slowly.  Every piece, unique.  It has added a great deal of sentiment to, otherwise completely ordinary, objects.  In fact, we love our growing menagerie so much that we've chosen to display it on our kitchen bookshelf.

Of course, I have my favorites...

Like, I really love this little turquoise bowl because it says biscuit on the bottom

And, this little coffee mug has become my little cup of comfort in the mornings.

These tumblers and bobble glasses are so very much better than the foggy plastic Walmart cups we've been using for the past 12 months.

They remind me of the green vintage glasses I used to have in college.  Don't know what happened to those...

And, I sort of have a thing for birds.  We even found a fun Elliott's Owl plate.  Hopefully it lasts long enough for him to use it when he's older.

Our dish collection has become so special to us.  A bonding endeavor.  Pieces will break over time, which will be sad, but the collection won't be lost.  We'll just have to set out to find new additions to keep the project alive.