We’ve reached the point in our parenting lives where the annoying moments begin to pretty closely balance the delightful moments. Our girls are all good, but they’re also getting older and hitting natural stages where they become more challenging, whether they’re good kids or not.

We had a couple truly delightful moments over the past few days, though.

Saturday night we were watching the Royals-Angels game and Albert Pujols came to bat at an important moment in the game. He battled Joakim Soria to a full count with the bases loaded, two outs, tie game, top of the seventh. Soria completely fooled Pujols, who looked at a fastball right down the middle to end the inning. As is my custom on called third strikes, I yelled out, “SIT DOWN, PUJOLS!” There was a moment of profound silence followed by all three girls saying, “PUJOLS?!?!” at the same time and bursting into hysterics. They laughed for like 10 minutes, delighting in “Pujols” over-and-over.

Sunday at our family Easter gathering, after their cousin added “Micah sauce” to our hosts’ whiteboard grocery list,[1] the girls added “Pujols sauce,” which I thought was pretty great.

Even Monday one of them would mutter, “Sit down, Pujols!” and send her sisters into more fits of laughter.

Next, kickball season began last week. Our family is off to a very good start, but more about that another time. When we discuss practices and games at home, S and I have a habit of using the phrase “kicked the crap out of the ball.” As in, “Peggy Sue was really kicking the crap out of the ball at practice today.”

For some reason the girls have started calling us on that. There are gasps and cries of mock outrage that we’ve uttered the word crap in front of them.[2] Granted, we would prefer they not use that word at school for sure, and limit it otherwise. But, still, it’s not like it’s a terrible word.

The best part, though, was when M had to pull the Know It All card and explain to her sisters why it’s a bad word. “It means the same thing as S-H-I-T, guys.”

C and L howled at her audacity. I actually thought it was pretty funny, too. But I also thought there was more than a little jackassery in her thinking her sisters don’t know what a synonym for crap is that they are not allowed to use yet.

I could write a lot more words on the things they’ve done – especially the two older ones – over the past week that have made me question my sanity. But I enjoyed those two moments more.


  1. His name is Micah.  ↩
  2. Seriously, they’ve heard way worse, mostly from their Old Man.  ↩