Good Parents

I'm going to go ahead and give a Good Parenting Award to both Troy and me today. I think we deserve it.

Troy gets his award for Outstanding Excellence in the Effort to Spend Time with Your Children. He's been working so hard lately - work, church, baby, wife, house, bike and kids. Not in that order. There is no order. It's all mixed up. But he's been making a real effort to do some fun stuff with the kids this last month before school starts despite his exhaustion. Last night he took the kids up to Strawberry Reservoir to go crawdad fishing. This is not a trip to Disneyland, I recognize, but the kids were almost as excited. And I know they will always remember it. I can't give you many details of the trip because Bundle and I took a rain check and enjoyed a snuggley evening at home together. I will say that apparently there is a learning curve to fishing for crawdads because they came home with, count 'em, FOUR crawdads. (I guess you can't get much fishing done when you spend half the night walking to and from the car with your daughter meeting her various needs, according to Troy.) Yes, just four. But those were the four most beloved crawdads in the world. The kids were so excited they could barely contain themselves, and this morning when they got up, I did not hear a single request for "can I watch a show?" They, especially Stomper, spent the entire morning out on the back porch playing with the crawdads. ("And when there was no crawdads, we ate sand." "You ate sand?" "We ate sand." Anyone who can name that quote is awesome.)



I confess that I started to feel a little sorry for the little beasts. Stomper played with them like toys. And I knew we were in trouble when he started giving them names. Oh no you don't, buddy. Time for the boiling water. Which is where my award comes in. Mine is really an Honorable Mention in the area of Doing Something You Don't Want To Do Because You Know It Will Make Your Kids Happy. Yes, I was the crawdad boiler, cooker and tear-aparter. I get only an honorable mention because I made Stomper put the crawdads in the water. For some reason, meat eater that I am, I had a hard time actually killing the poor little bugs. I thought Stomper would get all sad, but he was willing to toss his playmates into the pot without a second thought. What this means I'm choosing not to think about. Then I had to take care of getting the 1/2 oz. of meat out of each little one for the kids to dip in butter and eat. Bad news. They loved it and can not WAIT to go again. Oh, Man!

By the way, I couldn't help but think of Homer and his darling Pinchy throughout this experience...