Today I was having difficulty carving out the the single minute I need to fulfill my indulgent beauty regiment defined as the illustrious twenty second tooth brushing and simultaneous seductive scrunchified hair poof combination. This may have been due to the little love leeches (a.k.a. my children) I found attached to various parts of my being, which I was finding myself to be unsuccessful at shaking off. Now this is in no way atypical. By now means do I want you to believe that any morning runs so smoothly as to afford me an entire sixty seconds to myself. No. However, this day in particular I had a looming deadline fast approaching, as I had to host an outing for work and would actually have to leave the house without looking like an extra for “The Walking Dead.”  My first instinct to shake the little life-suckers? As an education nerd who spends my “spare time” immersed in research and data on all things child development, and who is always making an effort to put my budding geniuses best interests first, my initial thought…turn on the TV! But then there was my second thought that came from reading one too many articles “for fun”, which had to come and bully out my awesome couch potato idea, as my children had already succeeded at earning their highest percentage of T.V.-to-waking-hour percentage to date (an impressive 100%, 1:1 ratio) and were now also mirroring extras from “The Walking Dead”. So, in an attempt to produce some sort of brain functioning I grabbed the camera, handed it to the bossy one and told her to follow the wild one around as she hunted down household treasures that begin with each of her letter sounds. Of course, I knew that at best this would likely lead to a compilation of evidence of some sort of juvenile crime unfolding, and at worst would end up with (another) broken camera, but I was willing to play the odds in a desperate hope for hygiene. Thus, I was both surprised and suspicious when I succeeded and surpassed my beauty goals, even having the audacity to take the time to spend a few moments with my old friend floss, and was fearful of what I would find on film as photographic proof of my negligence. So as I scrolled through the A’s and found Alligator , Apple, Anna ,and even Aunt Andi, and then went onto B’s and found a perfectly posed pic of a boat, I was surprised to find myself battling with dueling emotions. I was ashamed of my presumption of failure and proud of my littles rebellion into obedience, and at the same time I was strangely saddened to see that their little pinch of pizazz that I both reprimand and have come to expect, was somehow absent.  And then,there it was…, the very last shot.

Today I am grateful for those rare times my kiddos follow the norm, not because I want them to fit into the box, but so when their little bums pop right out of that box, I can be reminded that this is who I really want my kids to be, themselves. Today I am grateful for “B” because it gave my girls a good excuse to photograph their bums and to showcase how learning really unfolds in our home.