Funeral Flowers and the Stinky Kid

So yesterday our whole family decided to walk down to the Piggly Wiggly and fetch some food for dinner. The girls were in the double jogger and Caleb was walking. Camille was throwing a tantrum because she wanted to ride on Daddy's shoulders and not in the stroller. Well, we live about 1/4 from a cemetery and sometimes flower arrangements blow off the headstones and end up on the street. Well, here we are walking along, Camille screaming and Caleb decides to be helpful. He runs ahead, grabs this arrangement on the curb (think big fake flowers stuck into floral foam that have been out in the weather for way too long!) and presents it to his sister. "Here Camille," he says. "I got these beautiful flowers for you."

Camille stops crying and her face lights up, "Wow! Caleb, those are such beautiful flowers." She puts them on her lap and admires them. Then she realizes that they are really too big for her to hold and she turns to Rob. "Daddy...will you please hold my flowers for me?"

The whole thing just totally had me cracking up! It's not enough that my kid picked up some dead guy's flowers to make his sister stop fussing - or that it worked! - but then they expected their dad to parade around town holding the arrangement. It was a few minutes before I could regain my composure.

(Rob managed to to get Camille to agree to leave her arrangement where we found it and pick it up on our return trip. Fortunately she forgot all about them by the time we came home so I didn't have to have that sitting around the house!)

So then we're sitting at dinner and I tell Caleb that he needs to get ready for a shower right after dinner. "Why?" he asks. I explain that he needs to shower because he's dirty and because he doesn't want to be the dirty stinky kid at school. "What's a dirty stinky kid?" he asks. I explain that it's a kid who doesn't shower when mom says to and plays in the dirt and doesn't wash their hands afterwards. He tells me there's a stinky kid in his class. "But I don't remember who." I tell him to be sure that he isn't the stinky kid.

"Wait! I remember now. I am the stinky kid in my class," he says.

"What?"

"Well...sometimes I stick my hands in my pants by my bottom and then my hands smell like bottom!"

Nice. I get to explain to my kid that we shouldn't put our hands down our pants, especially at school. Lucky me.

What's a mom to do? I did what any self-respecting mom would do. I turned to Rob and admitted, "He takes after your side of the family!"

Needless to say, yesterday was a funny day in our household. Since I tend to cry when I laugh I didn't have any makeup left by the end of the day!