A day without laughter is a day wasted. - Charlie Chaplin
Indeed.
Fortunately, I have a pretty crazy household. I get this stuff all the time.
Usually, it involves the middle Ms. Hat.
One day, I heard her say behind me, "Look, Mom! I'm Mulan!"
Yeah, I gasped so audibly the neighbors probably heard me. And then I laughed my head off.
Then there was the time she thought my blemish (makeup) stick was lipstick.
She frequently says the funniest things, too. I have a whole log I'll spare you, but here's a select few:
Last year's note to Santa:
"Santa - Merry Christmas from Gracie. I am very, very sorry with my attitude this year.
Please don't give me coal. Please, please don't give me give me coal."
[Here, I interrupted: "Well, he'll probably say, 'Then watch your attitude.'" So she went and finished her note.]
"Please don't say 'Don't give me attitude." Please, please don't write that. Merry Christmas."
On the way home one day -
RADIO: "Is your child defiant? Is back-talking a problem?
You can change your child's behavior. Call 1-800-blah...."
GRACE: "Mom, don't call that number."
After school, Gracie told me she'd spent a large part of the day sneezing,
so much so they had the school nurse evaluate her.
"I'm allergic to boys," she said, very seriously. "Whenever I sit by boys, I start sneezing. Except for Jessie..."
[Jessie is the teen-aged brother of her best friend who Gracie had a serious crush on.]
"He doesn't have dust."
On the Fourth of July after kindergarten, Grace wanted to demonstrate her ability to say the Pledge of Allegiance.
She rattled it off perfectly, ending with "...with liberty and justice for all. You may now be seated."
After I got done laughing, I told her that "you may now be seated" wasn't part of the pledge.
"Well, that's the way my principal says it!!"
On the way to school, Gracie asked, "What's 'prind'?" "Prind?!" "Yeah, P-R-N-D." "That's not a word." "Well, what is that in front of you?" I gasped out between fits of laughter: "Those are letters for Park, Reverse, Neutral and Drive."
Then there's the ham to all her cheese:
Yep, even the cat is not immune:
I'm telling you, it's crazy over here.
There's humor in the things I find myself saying, funny simply because it's just. so. ridiculous that a situation is occurring that requires it to be said. Things like "stop sucking on the cat" and "don't whip your siblings with your hair" just aren't normal. OK, they are normal HERE, but you probably won't hear them elsewhere; there, you'll find other moms saying equally silly things.
I even find humor at the grocery store, which is good because I find a whole lot of "grrrr" there, too.
But I laugh every time I pass the sign over a frozen aisle that says "Frozen Ice Cream" as though there's another aisle where you can find melted ice cream. This week, I approached one aisle from a different direction than usual and laughed when I saw the small "sensible snacks" sign hanging over potato chips and fried pork rinds. And there's that time my husband brought home their cash register-generated coupon for "Tyson Frozen Breasts. No thawing required."
Laughter is what keeps me sane. Finding that little nugget of funny in any form from slap-stick to error to witty irony and responding with laughter is like releasing the cork on the bottle containing all the
yuck in life.
Humor is everywhere you look for it.
Thank goodness, because as Charlie knows, it'd be a wasted life without it.
So, laugh today. And then come back and tell me how humor saved your day.
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