Stuff Parents Say

There are a lot of statements you expect to make as a parent, and I‘ve made them all.

Stop sitting so close to the TV.

Don’t stick out your tongue; your face will freeze like that.

If everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?
But there’s some things you don’t expect.

Years ago I started a list of Things I Never Thought I’d Say Until I Became a Parent.

I’ve forgotten most of the list, but I remember #1 and #2. And it looks like as of yesterday I’ve got a #3. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

So here‘s the beginning of the list:

#1. “Don’t put that sucker back in your mouth after it’s been on the cat.”

Yep. That one was when ET, my oldest daughter, was about four. She was licking a lollipop, sticking it on the cat’s back, and then licking it again. Ewwwww…

#2. “Stop feeding your baby sister boogers.”

That was around the same time, so ET was four and GG was one. They were sitting in the back seat and ET was picking her nose and then placing the product in her baby sister’s mouth. GG thought this was a great game, by the way. Double ewwwww…

So now we come to last night. We are visiting our family in Alabama and the kids were playing with their cousins upstairs while the adults were talking downstairs. Then GG came down complaining that there was cheese in her cell phone.

First of all, you’re probably thinking a ten-year-old is too young to have a cell phone. Well, I TOTALLY agree. However, the cell phone policy I established when the oldest kid started begging for one was: If you can buy it with your own money (including the minutes) then you can have one. Ergo, I’ve got a ten-year-old as well as the thirteen-year-old with cell phones.

So GG brought me her phone, and sure enough, there was a bunch of soft cheese jammed in the DC outlet. I could tell it was the snack cheese that ET brought over here in her suitcase.

I called ET down and asked her if she’d put cheese in her sister’s cell phone. She denied it. I wasn’t sure what to believe about that, so I just said, “Leave your sister’s phone alone.”

And that’s when I added a statement to my list of Things I Never Thought I’d Say Until I Became a Parent.

#3. “How would YOU like it if your sister put cheese in YOUR phone?”

Except I couldn’t get through saying it before I started laughing so hard I couldn’t finish talking. I mean, what kind of a statement IS that?

But we still don’t know for sure how the cheese got in the phone. It could have been ET or Boo. Maybe one of the cousins did it. My husband theorized that a man made entirely of cheese came in and used the phone, perhaps to call his Cheese Wife. (There is also a strange, cheesy substance on the cat’s back, which may support the Cheese Man Theory. And yes, that’s the SAME long-suffering cat who had a sucker stuck to his back!)

I guess we’ll never know what REALLY happened…