The Sunday Funnies

Ah, Sunday.  Always a day of peace, rest, and spirituality.  That is, unless there are kids involved.

I bought these cool little books from Costco for the kids to doodle in during church.  Each page has at least the beginning of a drawing with plenty of space for the kids to fill in whatever their creative little minds can come up with.  Surprisingly, Bitty has been taking each page slowly and methodically, taking care with every detail.  Stomper, and I'm pretty sure a few of his buddies who slip into our row from time to time, has gone through his books with a fury and not everything drawn there is appropriate.  I picked up one of the books after church the other day and started flipping through it and came upon many a page that had been filled in with the following vein of 8-year-old-boy humor: 

Can one laugh and be angry at the same time? I have to confess to some serious chuckling, though not while Stomper was looking, that's for sure. I now understand the furtive looks Stomper was shooting me during church.

Another favorite moment of the week was at the library.  The kids have been participating in the City Library's Summer Reading Program and we were there to collect our prizes after the kids had filled in another page of their charts.  The prizes this time were fortune cookies, which Stomper was certainly less than thrilled with but Bitty and Bundle dove into with enthusiasm.  Bitty popped open one cookie and asked me to read aloud what her fortune said.  I snickered as I read it to her:

"Your day will be somewhat dictated by authority."  

Bitty was not comfortable with this notion, as she makes abundantly clear on a daily basis.   This led to a discussion about the definition of the word authority and how it might (or might not) apply to her.  I was humored by my own exasperation with our chat when I caught another mom in the next row laughing out loud at me and my daughter.  She looked like she had taken a walk in my shoes before.  Ah, kids.

You know, The Becky introduced me to a wonderful new vocabulary word that is extremely validating.  She told me the story of a man in ancient Greece who got in trouble with the big shots.  I don't remember what he did, but it must not have been good because he was condemned for all eternity to push a big rock up a hill, and every time he is just about to the top, the rock slips from his grasp to roll all the way back down the mountain, where he has to go and begin again.  His name: Sisyphus.  His experience and all others like unto it can be described as (get ready for this awesome word): Sisyphean.  Let me use it in a sentence for you:

Sometimes, parenting can be quite Sisyphean, don't you think?  (You can substitute the word "laundry," "grocery shopping," "fixing the house," "mowing the lawn," or any number of things for the word "parenting," as I'm sure you will once you start using Sisyphean in your everyday conversations.)

I love it.  We just have to keep rolling that dang rock up the hill and we just never quite make it to the top, do we.  Well,  as long as we're never going to arrive at our destination, here's to enjoying the journey.  The long, arduous, sweaty, journey.  Just kidding.  Sort of.  And by the way, if I'm so Sisyphean, how come my muscles have not developed in such an awesome manner, I ask you?