Poop Necklaces and Good Mornings

Sometimes I wish I had hidden cameras around my house simply to capture the variety of conversations that occur within these walls. This morning, for instance, my son and oldest daughter were rough-housing in the living room. He play-kicked, she squealed, and things were getting out of hand.

“If you’re going to play like that,” I said, “you need to do it outside.”

“Okay,” my daughter agreed, then turned to her little brother and said, “Let’s go outside and pretend the grass is a bunch of houses.”

“Okay,” he agreed, “but no kicking.”

“But you just kicked me!”

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, because it was obviously the most logical explanation. “But still, no kicking.”

Then, not two minutes later, as they’re still making their way outside, my son says, “I wish I had a cross necklace.”

My daughter teases him, “I thought you had a poop necklace.”

Groan. It’s another poop conversation.

“No, I don’t have a poop necklace!”

“But if you were a dung beetle,” my eldest pursues the point, “well, boys don’t usually wear necklaces, not most boys, but dung beetles push dung around, so I think a girl dung beetle would wear a poop necklace….”

Then they’re out the door and blessed silence descends, broken only by the sound of their running footsteps across the porch, the wind chime on that same porch, and the sound of my four-year-old, seated apart from the fray, coloring and singing to herself snatches of a Mandisa song:

“Good mornin’! Wake up to a brand-new day. Good mornin’! Wake up to a brand-new day! Good mornin’….”

And I guess it is. But I still wish I had a hidden camera.