Parenting Advice

Never allow your third grade boys to watch Animal Planet unattended, lest you must field questions such as these...

As they come running into the room, "Mommy, did you know there are worms that get inside of you and live?"

"Do we have worms inside of us?"

"Are you sure?"

"How do you know?"

"Yah, but how do you know for sure?"



Twenty minutes later...
"We really might have those worms inside of us, Mommy. Bowzer could too."
Me - "Bowz gets medicine every month so he won't get those worms. He's okay and so are you."

"Can we please have some of his medicine just in case?"




Maybe I should put the medicine under lock and key for awhile. So, while you may be tempted to think my boys are a mite-bit nuts and seriously overdramatic, I must admit they get their vivid imaginations quite honestly and not from their father I fear. Once when we were camping when I was a child, I needed to use the potty in the middle of the night. My dad got up and walked me to the flush toilets down the road because if there's anything worse than pit toilets in the daytime, it would be pit toilets in the dark of night, but I digress. So, while sitting there doing my business, a small, funny looking fly landed on my undies. I flicked it off like any normal girl would do and followed it up with a shiver of gross! Most normal people would have though nothing more of it, but because I was a young girl with a nasty imagination that happened to work on overload at nighttime, and because I'd seen a show about some man in a tropical place becoming seriously ill by a "seetsy" (sp?) fly, I spent the rest of the night worried about that stupid little fly having laid microscopic eggs on my underwear and having them all hatch into little worms that were invading my body while I slept. Forget the fact that we were in Brown County, IN and not some tropical place. Forget the fact that fly eggs don't hatch that quick. Forget the fact that common sense says "duh"! So, as I said, they get it honest!

*Okay, Mom and Inkling, pick yourselves up off the floor! If it were actually a decent time of day and not after midnight when my tired brain apparently quit functioning properly, I probably never would have actually told the entire world that story. Oh well!