Day 1152 - Thanks for the Heads Up

Kids are messy eaters. No matter how many times I ask them not to stuff their pancakes in their pants, I inevitably find maple syrup on their butts.

Being at home with the kids by myself, there are times when you miss their misbehavior because you're cleaning up, doing the laundry, or closing multiple porn site ads on your laptop before your wife returns home.

After their snack, I started to tidy up the floor a little bit. While wiping up a trail of maple syrup to who knows where, I noticed some bits of food on the wall. It was all dried up and crusty so it must've been there a few days. I wasn't able to scratch it off with my finger, and even when I wet it with my saliva, the crust was still stubborn.

I grabbed an abrasive sponge from the kitchen and started to alternate between scrubbing the crust with a sponge and picking at it with my fingernails. It was a surprisingly slow process.

Emma came up to me and asked, "What are you doing, Daddy?"

"I'm cleaning the wall because someone put yucky bananas on it," I explained to Emma. "Did you do this?"

"No," said Emma. "Andrew did it."

A-ha! I knew it was Andrew because he's the banana eater.

"But it not banana," continued Emma. "It Andrew's boogies."

Immediately, I stopped picking at the crust with my fingers. "It's what?"

"Boogies!" Emma exclaimed with delight.

Andrew moseyed up and I asked him, "Andrew! Is this your boogie?"

"Yup," he said with no guilt, but a slight trace of delight.

"You don't put boogies on the wall!" I screamed as I began picking Andrew's boogies out of my fingernails. "Why did you do this?"

And Andrew had an answer. "I do it because Emma laugh and laugh and laugh because I put boogies on the wall."

As the kids looked at each other and started laughing about boogies, I lamented the fact that Andrew was going to join his Daddy as another laugh whore in the family.