Pet Therapist

My 11 yr old daughter has long claimed to be a great "pet therapist" that can "cure" animals of whatever mental problem they possess. She is currently visiting her grandparents, who have two awful little dogs that hate everyone.

As a gesture of good-will, my daughter bought the dogs a new chew toy, which they love, but they still hate her. The dogs will happily chew on the toy, but if she gets anywhere near them while they chew it they bark at her, if she finds it not being chewed and picks it up they come running and bark at her, and if she throws it to them they make sure the chew toy is safe, then come running and barking at her.

Since my daughter has been so set on being a "pet therapist" for years, I asked her if she'd done anything else to try to help the dogs become nicer. Without missing a beat, she said, "Oh GOD, no! If they left me alone with those dogs, they'd kill me!"

Old Man

My 11 yr old has befriended an older man whose back yard meets up with our back yard. They're both outside in the nice weather quite often and chat over the fence about all kinds of topics. However, when referring to the man, she can never remember his name and instead tells people about "the old man that lives in our back yard."

Safety Matters

For Christmas the man in red brought my kids a 12' tall teepee. When the weather was nice we had the teepee up in the back yard a few times, but never bothered with staking it, and it kept being blown over in storms, so we put the cumbersome behemoth away for a while. Last weekend I finally got out tent stakes and the kids helped me make sure that thing isn't going anywhere.

The kids like to have backyard campouts, and sleep in a regular tent, so I thought they might like to sleep in the teepee instead. My 6 and 11 yr old kids jumped at the opportunity, while my 8 yr old balked at the idea, and said, "But the doors only TIE SHUT, it's not safe like a tent with a ZIPPER."

I'm not sure that's much to brag about...

6 yr old, as he prepares to show me just how fast he can go:

"I can run faster than a cantaloupe!"

I'm not sure I want to know...

This afternoon my 6 yr old was trying to have a deep conversation with me about killing zombies and aliens with laser guns, when suddenly a look of concern came across his face...

6 yr old: Mommy, do some girls not grow up and have babies?

me: Girls can choose if they want to have babies, or not.

My 6 yr old's triumphant little fist shot straight up in the air, quickly followed by a resounding, "YES!"

Terminator

My 11 yr old daughter's comment upon seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger on the morning news, discussing possible marijuana debates:

"Wow, the governor of California looks and sounds a LOT like the Terminator!"

Story from the Past - On the Death of a Hamster

This isn't directly something my kids said/did, but it involved them, and I was reminded of the situation when I read Michael Ian Black's story of a death in his family. This series of events took place about 2 years ago.

When my oldest daughter's hamster died, we still had all the setup, and the kids wanted to replace it with a new hamster. I very firmly said, "NO," which led my husband to think I meant they needed something else that could live in the hamster cage. A week later he took the kids out "to the park" and they came back with three pet mice - one for each kid.

If you think one hamster smells like pee, three mice smell like a urinal that hasn't been cleaned in a month.

About two weeks after the mice showed up, my then 4 yr old woke up to discover one of the mice had died during the night, and, as an honor to their lost friend, the other mice had started eating it.

After that, the kids lost interest in the other two mice, and I went "to the park" one day while the kids were at school, and my husband was at work. Thank God the pet store didn't try to charge me to take back those mice. Nobody ever commented on the missing pets, but if they'd asked I would have said that the Mouse Rapture had occurred and obviously both of our mice had been among the chosen.