Kids

My daughter was in a car accident recently.

While walking with one shoe on and one shoe off, which she insists is the only way to walk, she was gripping a little hot wheels car in her hand. Her brother and another friend were playing with cars and had them splayed all over the floor. She happened to step on one, did a banana peel flip and landed with a hot wheel shot to the eye. For a solid week now she's had a full-on black eye Brad Pitt would be proud of.

She's also the climbier one of my two kids. Today she climbed up onto a chair, then onto the high chair where she stood swaying. She survived this climb, but she usually doesn't. My little sweetie has two matching bruises on the sides of her forehead from previous climbs. The other day she was walking on our driveway trying out her new sandals. As per her usual, she was hoarding toys in her hands and under her neck. When she tripped over her unbendy new sandaled feet, her hands were unavailable to break the fall. Her face, however, was available, and so now she's got a skinned nose.

The worst part is I think she might have an ear infection but there's no way I'm taking her in to see the doctor with all of her facial bruises in various stages of healing.

My two and a half year old is very observant of the world around him. His vocabulary is catching up with everything he notices, but he still has trouble with sounds. For example, he can't say the "tr" blend. Instead, he pronounces "tr" as "f." So imagine what Interstate 35 was like all the way home from Iowa today.

"Mom look! I see a great big f***!" "Wow, that's a super-fast f***!" And, he has a little Elmo one too. "Watch my Elmo f***!"

He also has trouble with the "st" sound--he pronounces it as "d." So when we were outside playing in the yard he said, "Wow! I found a big d***!" "Mom, you want this big d***?" "Oh, I keep the big d*** and you get the little d***."