sorry about the dead quail, red butte garden

Can anyone tell me why it is that when you do something fun with/for your kids, they repay you by being rotten and terrible? This can manifest in many ways, including, but not limited to: peeing their pants, barfing in the car or other hard-to-clean place, fighting, disobeying, throwing rocks at small animals, being base and vulgar, generally acting like lab monkeys. Like this:

I'm sure there is some eternal law that makes this so, because it is so consistently enforced. I think maybe I'm supposed to learn that I shoudn't expect fun outings to affect behavior. Maybe it's supposed to teach me patient continuance in well-doing. BORING.

One of these days I'll learn to stop being so nice.

smells like rotten eggs, tastes like pennies

The kids built a vainglorious marble maze at Grandma Maxine's house. That's pretty cool, but even cooler is the fact that they cleaned up after themselves without being asked! We are the best parents since the beginning of time.

Right before we got our nasty fast food we saw that the famed Soda geyser was going off, so we went and played in the sulfurous water for a while.

At the family reunion we made rockets and shot them off. Ryan's windshield got broken. By his own child's rocket. This is why we can't have nice things.

A conversation between my Uncle Ron and Superman, when Superman grabbed someone else's chair and sat down in it:

Ron: "Hey, where's your chair?"

Superman: "We're HUFFS! There's cat poop on our chairs, we're unorganized, and sometimes we forget things . . . and we're late to church."

My kids are so weird.

getting better all the time

We are watching with great anticipation the development of Captain America's sense of humor.

When I stated a truth:
Captain America: "You can say that as many times as you want."

On John's Father's Day card he wrote:
Reasons why I love you
1. you're awesome
2. you play fun games with us
3. this is a silver pen

Upon driving into the parking lot of Nielsen's Frozen Custard:
Captain America: "Somebody just took our parking space. How like them."

she can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye

I was working on a post about my kids and how much I love them, but I'm mad at them right now, so instead here is a conversation I just had with Pinga.

Pinga: "Fix my dolly!"
Me: "I'm not going to fix her anymore, because you just keep taking her head off."
Pinga: "I want to take off her feet."

when I leave I'm not coming back

At the dinner table Pinga was having an imaginary conversation on her pretend cell phone from the dollar store.

Pinga: "Yeah. (pause) Yeah. (pause) I don't like my food."

Then she pushed her plate off the edge of the table and spilled the food all over the floor. I don't think I'm going to let her talk to whoever that is anymore.