I wanted to get a picture of her outfit (complete with my shoes) and Clare ran to get a cracker to pose with.

 While I don’t tell a lot of stories about my kids bodily functions, I hope you’ll forgive me a poop story.  Last week Adam heard Clare and Gabe run into her room and slam the door.  This is pretty typical and he went down a few minutes later to open the door figuring he would find them jumping on the bed.   He walked in and realized he smelled something.  Clare looked guilty.  Then he noticed that there was a little pile of poop on the floor.  “Clare, where are we supposed to poop?”  “In the potty.”  “Why did you poop on the floor?”  “B-b-but… it’s a Halloween decoration!”

We’re also facing a fair amount of talking back and arguing these days.  It’s frustrating, but also kind of funny and I struggle to keep a straight face sometimes.  Today I found that Clare had ripped the pages of one of her books during naptime.  This has been an ongoing issue and a few days ago I told her that if she did it again I would take all the books in her room.  So today I had to do that.  She looked at me and said “No Mama.  I just ripped the one book, so you should just take away the one book.”  I told her that if she couldn’t treat her toys and books with respect then she would lose them.  “No Mama.  I respected the other books so I should keep them.”  While I appreciated her logic, we still packed up her books and she’ll get them back a few at a time in the next week or so.