“What are you doing Mom?”
“I’m just trying to think of something to write about for my MamaPop post today.” 
He thought about it for a while.
“Why don’t you just type random letters?”
“Just like 10th grade geography papers?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
*
We were playing “The Cleaning Game” at my house.
This involves me setting the timer on my iPhone for 10 minutes. For 10 minutes, there is only playing – no cleaning whatsoever. It is important to start with a playing segment. When the alarm rings I start the timer again. For 10 minutes there is fast cleaning. We get as much accomplished as we can in 10 minutes.
Sometimes we do it in 20 minute increments, if the house is really trashed we’ll do 20 minutes clean, 10 minutes play. We do this over and over until either the house is clean or we get distracted.
Generally it is the latter.
Either way, we were playing The Cleaning Game today and I was doing dishes for my 10 minutes when Ian came into the kitchen crying.
“Claudia gets to do all of the fun cleaning.”
“No cleaning is fun.” I said, “I mean, what kind of cleaning is fun cleaning?”
“She gets to clean the bathroom!”
“And you think cleaning the bathroom is fun cleaning?”
He nodded.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said “If you do a really, really good job on the living room and getting all of your toys out of the hallway I will let you clean my bathroom.”
And he said “Yes!” and did that thing with where you make a fist and pull your elbow to your hip – like he just scored a touchdown.
It doesn’t seem to happen that often lately, but for today everybody wins.
The hardest part about being a parent – besides the sleep deprivation and all of the crushing responsibility – is keeping a straight face when I say things like “Pu-pu platters are not funny!” or “Nobody wants to see you shaking your butt all day long.” or “That isn’t really called an upper nut.”
Full disclosure: I was not at all able to refrain from laughing at that last one. I think I may have even snorted causing him to say “But Mommy, it’s true. My upper nut hurts.” which crushed me on my insides and made my outsides laugh even harder.
On a related topic, what do you call the area right above a person’s penis? I guess I should have sucked it up and taken anatomy and physiology after all.
“See, that is the difference between you and me. I try not to look at your butthole.”
“Mommy?” he said “Can you live without ever drinking chocolate milk?”
“Sure,” I said “Lots of people probably never drink chocolate milk.”
“You can live without ever ever drinking a single drop of chocolate milk?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Claudia said you can’t live if you don’t drink chocolate milk.”
Then a little voice came from the other room.
“I said you could not live happily without drinking chocolate milk.”
