But yesterday the kids did a couple noteworthy and amusing things.
The first I posted on Facebook, but I will repeat here for those who don't pay attention to the facebook news feed or, more likely, have blocked me because I post a lot of pointless garbage. The second happened at the dinner table and I managed to get some video of it!
Monday, we went to my nephew's birthday party. Both kids received little goody bags, and inside those bags were several pieces of gum. Gabe has not really had much experience with gum yet. He's gotten a couple small pieces from the gumball machine at his dentist (sugar free--kind of like chicklets, which aren't really gum, more like a bit of bread dough with a coat of industrial strength varnish), and he's always just chewed them like candy and swallowed them.
In general, though, I've been trying to avoid exposure to gum. It falls into the category of Low Payoff for High Risk of Mess. Other things that fall into this category include . . . well, children. The list would take too long to flesh out, so let's just sum it up by saying that it's better to keep children in a sterile environment, like the Bubble Boy, and, preferably, sedated.
But, not being able to do that, I've mostly contented myself by keeping some of the worst mess makers, like gum, out of reach. Gabe, however, has been insistent on trying, and he was able to see what was in his goody bag before I was able to secret out all the gum and dispose of it properly. So there was no escaping it.
Before giving him the gum, though, I prefaced its eating with some guidelines and warnings for Gabe. 1) He would have to eat it at the table. He couldn't get up while he was still chewing it. 2) When he was done chewing it, he would spit it directly into the trash can. Never was the chewed gum to touch anything but his mouth and the inside of the trash can. 3) He would chew the gum and then spit it out, meaning he would not swallow it. I avoided telling him that the gum would sit in his stomach for seven years, not digesting (as I had been told as a child) because I can't see how that could possibly be true. But, despite the fact that there might not be any harm in swallowing it, I still don't think it should be done. It doesn't seem proper. 4) If I ended up finding gum stuck to something, ANYTHING, other than the inside of the trash can, there would be undetermined hell to pay.
And then, just to solidify this last bit in his mind, I told him a few horror stories from my childhood--possibly true, probably not--about my brothers and I getting gum stuck in our hair. In these stories, we had peanut butter smeared into our hair, used liquid nitrogen to freeze it, and then ended up still having to remove large swathes of hair from our heads. I tried to draw him a mental picture of a hideously mangled head of hair, with mangy bald spots and ratty ends, and how the kids at school ruthlessly and endlessly teased us. How we cried and cried and gnashed our teeth and rung our hands and pulled even larger chunks of hair out of our heads in frustration.
Well, maybe I didn't go into that much detail. But I did tell him that we had to cut chunks of hair off our heads and we ended up with bald spots. To which Gabe had a wonderful response:
Me: "If you get gum stuck in your hair, we'll have to use the scissors to cut it out and you'll have big bald spots on your head."
Gabe: "Did you get a lot of gum in your hair?" he asked as he looked at the top of my head.
Now, there are clearly two ways to interpret this question. Either he was responding to the story I had just told him, where I had gotten gum in my hair and had it cut out, and he was just clarifying that, at some point in my history, I had gotten a lot of gum in my hair. OR, my kid is a snarky smart ass who was taking a jab at all the hair that's fallen out of my head (pretty much entirely since we became parents). Obviously I'm hoping for the second option.
So there's that.
In other news, at the dinner table last night, this happened:
Arrrrgh!
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