Things I've Figured Out Recently, that You Might be Glad to Know for Yourself

Five year olds are both inquisitive and creative. If one of them locates a tiny little hole in his down jacket, and spies the end of a feather poking through, he WILL remove the feather. If you are driving a car containing such a child, he may start loudly demanding, "Say SOMETHING. Say something so that I can see if I can hear you." Be prepared for the revelation that he has done something unthinkable with giant handfuls of down. Do not look at him to see what he has done until you are at a point where you can close your eyes and laugh until you are weak. Because when you turn around in your seat, he MAY resemble a Great Horned Owl, with delicate feathers of downy fluff poking out of both ears and clinging to his hair, and it MAY turn out that he has shoved an astonishing quantity of the stuff into his ears to see if he could make ear plugs, and you MAY find yourself insistently commanding that he remove the feathers before they get stuck, and simultaneously wanting to wet yourself with laughter as a whole clown car's worth of down is removed from an ear canal the size of a teaspoon. (Image from here.)

Also, don't be surprised if he tries to reload all that down into the jacket through the pinhead sized hole, if you tell him that the down is what keeps him warm, and he'd better not take out any more.

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If you continue to indulge in homemade macaroni and cheese as your winter comfort food, and then compound that by discovering that you can easily make a 1/3 batch of fresh, warm, gooey Rice Krispie Treats at 9pm, it does not matter how much you exercise. You will not lose weight.

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If you try to change the cartridge in your kitchen sink faucet to stop the incessant leaking that is driving you batty, and you choose to do so a mere 48 hours before hosting a birthday party at your house, be prepared to host said party in a kitchen with no running water whatsoever. (Yes, this also means you cannot run your dishwasher.) It can be done, and everyone will still enjoy the cake. But it's somewhat more difficult to orchestrate than if you'd just left the leaky sink alone for two more days and gotten all "I Too Can Be A Plumber" after the party instead of before.

Also, you never realize how wonderful running water in the kitchen is until you have to fill cooking pots with hot water in the bathroom and haul that to the kitchen for cooking and washing up.

Getting all "I Too Can Be A Pioneer" is less gratifying than playing plumber.

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If that little voice in the back of your head tells you that you ought to pop that spare swimsuit into your gym bag, you really should listen. Because apparently that little voice knows that you will shortly trek to the gym with two children, a large lunch, and many other items in tow, but will leave your running shoes (which were just hanging on the strap of the gym bag) at home on the mudroom floor. And the little voice further knows that the only swimsuit currently in your gym bag is a two piece surfer ensemble in size 5T.

And the little voice further knows that because you can't swim laps and you can't go running, but you are a stubborn woman who has just gotten two children out of the house and to the gym in time to meet her friend there for a work out, you are the type to decide to "simply" use the rowing machine and lift weights -- in clogs.

Moral: even if the little voice doesn't have the words "I told you so" in its vocabulary, it is always right. If it tells you to bring a swimsuit, you will invariably need a swimsuit. In all things, listen to the little voice. (Little voices, plural, are something else entirely. You might want to try to make them go away.)

You're welcome.