Confession time: I'm currently using the back of my child's latest art project from school as my grocery list. Shhh!

Everyone in this house has a conniption when I throw away any drawing, coloring page, or graded paper. To them, it's a sign that I hated whatever prized page I discarded. To me, it's an act of love to keep us off that show Hoarders. After all, we have three children. By the time they all graduate high school, they will have been in school a combined minimum of 7,560 days. Provided they only bring home one paper a day for me to save, that would be a LOT of papers. Can you imagine the refrigerators I would need to display all that mess? But the truth is, they each come in from school every day with a huge stack of papers and no less than two art projects. If I saved everything, mathematically speaking, we would be buried alive and miss the youngest kid's graduation in 14 years. And so it's with love that I save a select few masterpieces, recycle the projects I can (hence the grocery list), and sneak the other 45 into the garbage.

Are you not supposed to wash your cell phone?

If smart phones are so smart, then why don't they hold their breath under water? I had a Samsung flip phone not so long ago that survived an entire washing machine cycle in the pocket of my jeans, and after a day of drying out, it worked great. I was torn between being bummed because I was kind of hoping for a new phone and being relieved because if I killed the lesser phone, then I would never be able to convince my husband to invest in something more expensive for me to destroy.

But I'm thinking if that phone could manage the washer, then the iphone ought to be able to withstand a quick dip in the pool while its owner fishes out a child who has fallen in. True story that happened to a friend. Glad he chose the kid over the phone! And in case the hubby reads this, no, I didn't immerse my phone. Had a close call with the bath tub last night, but it was just sprinkled. Does that mean it's a Methodist?

There has to be something phone manufacturers could do to protect their product better from water. After all, you can buy all sorts of shock-absorbing covers to protect it from falls, a fact I'm relieved to note. I've had a few split second moments in between the feeling of my phone slipping out of my grasp and the sound of it hitting the tile where in my mind I see shattered pieces of my hot pink and black iphone exploding everywhere only to open my eyes and find it undamaged and in one piece. Today, it fell out of my bag, and I didn't know it until I heard the crash and saw three pieces on the ground. Breath, Honey. One was the unbroken phone, and the other two were the halves of the cover.

I think it's all a conspiracy. The companies who make the covers are making a killing. So are the phone manufacturers because as they make flimsy, water-fearing phones, people must replace them frequently. cha-ching! Then to protect their replacements, owners buy better, more expensive covers. It's a win-win for them.

Moral of the story: if you listen to your ipod in the bath, and if you leave it on the side, TAKE OUT EAR BUDS BEFORE STANDING UP.

Please Don't Call Me Narrow-Minded and Intolerant

I have been reading about the trend of young women morphing from liberal-minded voters into conservatives as they become mothers. It's as if the media believes we moms have lost all ability to be open-minded and tolerant as we sink into a closed world of diapers and laundry. This is ludicrous, and I would argue that as moms, we women become obnoxiously tolerant of things for which the rest of society has no tolerance at all.

Take Barney and The Wiggles for example. They could drive a grown man to suicide, and I don't see why they didn't just make terrorists in Guantanamo Bay watch The Wiggles for about 5 days straight and play the "I love you" song from Barney all night long. They'd be ready to talk in no time. Perhaps this method was deemed too cruel by the Geneva Convention, and I can understand that. Yet, you park an irritable 2 year old in front of either of those shows, and he will sit still and become an angel for the 20 minutes it's on. Magic! What mom couldn't learn to tolerate something so detestable in the name of 20 minutes of peace.

Another example would be screaming children in general. I have friends who will quickly hang up the phone if they hear my kids yelling in the background. I also have a few well-meaning individuals in my life who have commented that I should discipline my kids better so they aren't so loud. How intolerant and prejudice can you get? I mean, kids are loud, and us mothers have become open-minded enough to accept that fact and not judge another mother when her children are banging on pots and provoking the dog to bark while she's on phone with us. We've all been there.

I'm not even going to grace the topics of religious and political tolerance with my high horse today, but I defend the position that us moms are the most tolerant people on the planet. And on that note, I'm going to clean up yet another potty puddle. See, who besides a mother would tolerate the same kid peeing and puking in her house more than once?

My two year old is having his first sleepover at Grannie's house tonight, and I am so thrilled! The dog hasn't figured out where the baby is, and when we came in from eating outside earlier, she whimpered a little and kept looking inside the tent we had played in. I assume she thinks we left him outside, although he had gone with Grannie before that.

Gran may be less than thrilled and the one whimpering in the morning though. #3 just emerged from a phase of waking up at 5:30 every morning. Not only would he wake up before the sun, but he felt obligated to wake up the other children and both parents as well. It got old very quickly, and I have to say, I am relieved to have had a couple of weeks in a row of peaceful slumber until a more reasonable hour. For Gran's sake, I hope the streak continues, but he'll be in a strange bed without siblings for the first time, so he may not sleep well.

When we are away from home, we put him in bed with a brother or sister, mainly because no adult wants to sleep near him. He's the cuddliest baby when he's awake, but in his sleep, he flops around like a fish out of water. We had to put toddler rails back on his bed after removing the crib rail because he kept falling out of bed. I'm sure it's normal, but after #2 who hardly moves in her sleep at all and #1 who prefers still to wedge himself firmly against the closest warm body (which inevitably leaves me with a solid 4 inches of space in which to get comfortable when he ends up in my bed), the erratic tossing of the third child is exhausting.

I'm sure though that tonight while he's not here to keep me up or get me up too soon, he will sleep like an angel. That's about how it goes.

"Depend on the rabbit's foot if you will, but remember it didn't work for the rabbit"-R.E. Shay

In Sunday School, we talked about superstitions and charms and I started thinking about where the idea of getting good luck from an object and getting bad luck from an action came from in the first place. Good luck charms are fairly easy to figure out. If you have something with you when a good thing happens, then you may assume the object led to the good thing. I don't really know why you'd be walking around with rabbit's feet though, unless you were starving and the rabbit was dinner. That might be a lucky break for you, but then I would think carrying around the severed limbs of your prey would scare away any future dinners. I've never tried hunting rabbits with or without lucky rabbit's feet, so I wouldn't really know either way.

Superstitions about bad luck seemed senseless to me, but when someone in class listed walking under a ladder as a common belief, a light bulb went on in my head. Perhaps these false notions have some pretty logical roots. For instance, the time I walked under my own ladder, I knocked a tray of turquoise paint off of it. While I don't anticipate 7 years of bad luck from the incident, I do have some bright little reminders of it on the carpet. And if I don't see the paint spots, I have a husband who will be glad to point them out to me...for as many years as the carpet remains. Maybe a truer sign of things to come would be "if you don't use a drop cloth, you'll have 7 years of bad luck."

I wasn't sure about the logic of not crossing paths with a black cat. I grew up near an elderly lady with a ton of cats though, and it got me thinking that maybe the ones who first came up with that superstition were kids with a crabby old cat neighbor. Then they would have warned each other, "if you get anywhere near that black cat, Mrs. Cranky will come out and yell at you. Good luck there, pal!" Then there's the one about breaking a mirror. Your level of bad luck will ultimately be reflected in WHOSE mirror you break. Some people are likely to hold that over you for years. If you're a teenage boy and it happens at your friend's house, you may need more than luck to get invited back over. A mom will forgive her own child for breaking her things, but if she's not your mama, don't break her mirror.

I'm not entirely graceful, and I've broken a few mirrors in my time. I doubt it's caused any bad fortune in my life. Unless...maybe the breaking of the mirror resulted in me being cursed with clumsiness rather than the clumsiness leading to the breaking. Hmmm. If that's the case, I better start looking for a good luck charm after all. Given my normal string of "bad luck." I'm thinking crash helmet, steel-toed boots, safety goggles are all good choices.