An Unfortunate Stage of Development

Elijah and Brigham have birthdays within just a few days of each other, five years apart. Two things I know. They were both born at the wrong time of year AND they are right where they should be developmentally. I only know these two things from anecdotal evidence, so you are free to disagree.

Though I'm too lazy to dig up the evidence to prove it to you today, both boys suffered from heavy mosquito bites to the forehead in their two-year-old summer. Both boys continued to show the evidence of these bites far into the autumn of the year in the form of bleeding picked scabs. Lovely, huh? Elijah still has visible scars. Brigham tries really hard to respond to my redirection.

Oh, and while I'm here being abstract, I'll share another funny story.

Brigham recently started a habit of chewing on his long sleeved shirts. He'd either chew the ends of the sleeves or the collars. After a while of this he was developing red, chaffed skin around his mouth. I decided it was time for an intervention. I started telling him, "Brigham, don't chew your shirt, chew your ears." It was SOOO funny watching him try to find a way to get his ears into his mouth. When he realized he couldn't do it, he started just pulling on his ears instead. Now, all I have to say is "Brigham, don't chew on your shirt," and he will automatically stop and reach to pull on his ears. He's almost completely cured.

Various things I'm liable to trip over

The other night I was having some trouble sleeping and so I decided to come out to the couch to sleep. That sometimes helps me. I noticed that the computer was on and came over to turn it off. As I was walking back to the couch, I tripped over the rocking chair. There really isn't anywhere to keep the rocking chair, but we don't want to get rid of it. It tends to just sit out in the middle of the room. I gave myself a pretty nasty bruise and rather than yell (all were asleep), I started thinking creatively. "I should make a list of all the things I trip over, " I thought. And it kept me going until the pain subsided.

1. Books. My library card which allows 50 books to be checked out is always maxed. My kids all have a card and will usually have between 5-10 books checked. That's a lot of books. They get spread all over the floor.

2. Hot Wheels cars. Brigham loves these things and is usually carting 2-5 cars around with him all the time, leaving them here and there when he picks others up. Definitely something I trip over.

3. Shoes. Our side entryway comes in on a landing. Just to the left, there are two steps up to the kitchen. We use this place to dump our shoes. There are usually anywhere from10-20 pairs of shoes sitting around that area. It can be deadly when I'm carrying the laundry basket downstairs to sort laundry!

4. Clothing. Do your kids just strip their socks off and leave them all over, or change in the middle of the living room and just dump the cloths there waiting for the laundry fairy to pick them up?

5. Cello. Oh no! We have no where safe to keep Nathan's cello. I keep it on top of my bed during the day, but at night we have to set it on the floor. I'm constantly saying, "Be careful of the cello." "Watch out for the cello!" One day I was finishing making my bed and placed the cello on the bed as Nathan was walking in the room. "What?" he said, "Why was that on the floor?" "Do you want me to sleep with it on my bed all night?" I asked. Never, never trip over a cello. Costly mistake.

6. Rocks. There will never be enough rocks in my house it seems. With our crushed limestone driveway and occasional trips to look for and collect rocks and fossils, the kids are constantly bringing new piles of rocks in the house. I will find piles of rocks on the floor of the living room, bedrooms, on top of dressers, on the bathroom counter, kitchen counter, washing machine. You name it, every surface has been home to a rock at one time or another.

7. Train tracks and accessories. Being a two year old boy, Brigham loves that stuff. I try to keep this only to his room, so I only have to trip on that when I take my sleeping boy up to his bed each night in the dark.

8. Basement storage room....Don't even get me started on that!!

So, what do you trip over at your house? :)

The Very Edge of Sanity

(Read this with a little humor and not too much seriousness.)

I have been there.

Yesterday I stood, staring at my sunshine-y yellow counter top and made a choice. On the left was a slight grip on sanity and on the right was "losing it" (I don't know why they arranged themselves to the right and left like that). I pondered it for a minute, but the choice on the right had too many unknowns, one of them being, "Will the people at the state mental hospital be kind to me?" I wonder where in my house I'll be when the choice comes up again and hope it's not a dingy, dusty place.

I don't know exactly what has driven me to this place. As usual, it's probably not one factor that I can pinpoint, but many interacting forces and choices. I don't know what will take me back again into my carefree and laid back life (ha!). Maybe starting a new school year will do the trick, then again, maybe not.

Last night, I asked Joseph if he thought we could collect enough oil from people's faces to fry something (my skin is very oily in the summer). He laughed and laughed, making me laugh too and told me that I am so off-the-wall and that he loves my sense of humor. But, I'm thinking that comment is only a little to the left of Mad Hatter. He threatened to include the comment in my "From the Back Seat" section of the blog and I decided to do the thing that I figured a respectable person would do. I came here, to my blog proper, and admitted it myself.

There.

The Story of a Modern-day Sampson (or in other words: "Nathan, stop punching your brother!")

Nathan and I had an agreement that if he used his fist to solve a dispute, I'd use the quarter inch attachment on the clippers. What happens now, do Sampson's arm muscles shrivel up so that he can't impose his force on others? No evidence of that. But, he's happy enough to have a lighter, cooler head. I'm hoping that feeling cooler will lead him to acting cooler, if you know what I mean.

Fun for Five Cents!

I do some of our family's grocery shopping at a no-frills place called Aldi. They really do have some good prices for some of the things we use all the time. I really need to save money on groceries because of the astronomical figure that showed up on my calculator as I added up the receipts for groceries in the last month. It was a lot larger than our mortgage, and these kids continue to grow. There are several reasons why I don't like to shop there, though.

1) Doing my own bagging! The shopping trip takes twice as long.

2) It's supposed to be a stock-up store and how do you stock up for a family of seven with one cart?

3) It's organized so that if you forget something you have to go against the crowd to retrieve the item.

4) You have to get your stuff on the conveyor belt QUICK! And the cashier checks people out QUICK, literally throwing things into the empty cart sometimes.

5) You have to buy your own bags. I usually use the 5 cent paper ones (Hey, we do try to plant one tree per year!).

But, for just five cents, Brigham had a whole lot of fun and it just washed away the pain from last night's shopping trip ($223.89! ACKKK!!).

Anything But Consistent

Another one of my character flaws has jumped from within the recesses of...well, I guess I had hidden it only from myself. Most everyone else is sure to know about it.

I was replying to an e-mail today. I got chatting with a friend about reading and decided to bore her with the history of my reading. (I forgot to mention the guilt that I carry around of being the only one of my siblings with whom my mom spent considerable time reading while my older sister was away at Kindergarten and before my younger sister was born). As it turns out, it was the typing of this droning monologue that captured my attention to my own inconsistency. I love to read, but I do it in spurts. I have a short memory for things like movies and books, so I have to move through them quickly or else I forget half of it and have to start over. Then I move on to some other hobby that fancies me for the moment. I don't have one underlying theme that I come back to all the time.

I'd like to say that hobbies are the only category that suffers in this way, but as I'm working to unfold the truth, I see this carries over into many areas. For instance, some months back I was patting myself on the back because over a period of about a week, I had consistently been involving at least one kid in the kitchen with me while cooking and baking. That fell by the wayside and I didn't even realize it. Today, May asked me if she could make her own (ahem!) Ramen noodles. That's the extent of any of my kids' cooking skills. I told her she could and still had to give her some pointers. She came into the living room sort-of smuggish and sat down to wait for her water to boil. I got up a few minutes later to a kitchen filled with natural gas! It seems she didn't have the technique down for turning on the gas stove top.

Discipline. There are times when I feel like I'm doing a good job and have a bag full of arsenal for the disobedient child. My favorite is to have two fighting children sit on the couch together until they are friends. My kids hate this because they want a definite time period. I pleasantly say, "Nope, stay until you are friends," while inside I'm snickering at the whole situation. I've got a list of these "nice" little consequences on my fridge. Time will go on and suddenly I'm jolted by the fact that I've been yelling to get their attention again. I'll read the list on the fridge and wonder who wrote them.

I heard it described before as "consistent at being inconsistent." Maybe it's the human plight. Maybe I'm unique? Finally, I've found my niche! I'm not really bothered by this new information about myself. I'm just not sure the knowledge is enough for change. Maybe I'll just push it back into the abyss...

I Agree. Maybe a Little Too Much.

At least I have someone to blame. That usually makes things all better. Right??

How To Break a Blogger's Slump

Alisa posted this fun activity on her blog and since I become exceedingly bored when I think of sitting down to blog and this actually seemed fun, I did it. Read below the mosaic to get the instructions:


The concept:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name

THIS IS WHERE THE CREDITS FOR THE PHOTOS GO!! My computer was sluggish and just at the time I was supposed to select and paste the HTML for the credits, it totally froze up (before I saved it to my flickr account). Here are my search words. If you paste them into flickr, you will find the pictures I borrowed. 1. Cindi 2. watermelon 3. Plymouth North High School 4. Green 5. Gregory Peck 6. Diet Coke 7. Seychelle Islands 8. Brownie Torte 9. Grandma 10. Serenity 11. Stressed 12. Moonflower

Terror in my Eyes!

How'd you like to wake up to this bad boy staring you in the eyes?



O.k. so it wasn't in by my bed, it was on the kitchen counter under this glass, but still! Nasty. I wouldn't let Joseph take the glass off for an ant photo shoot. It makes me yell and dance around like crazy. He wasn't here when I lifted the carpet piece up from inside the cupboard which was teeming with this guy's little brothers.

Dear Mr. Norton,

Since I'm now just counting down the seconds until I'm one day older and hopefully a few days richer, I can dedicate a few computer minutes to a letter to Mr. Norton:

Dear Mr. Norton,

I can't please you. I'll never be able to please you, so I'm writing to say that, "I GIVE UP!" I hope this doesn't make you any redder or more obnoxious, but that you will carve a place in your understanding code heart to put up with a human being who wishes to ignore you.

Each day I turn on my computer I have a whole slew of things I have to do before my computer can even function. This may be more Microsoft's fault than yours. I'll write Mr. Microsoft later to tell him that no deep discount will ever induce me to buy his terrible computers or computer copy-cats again. Having down-loaded maybe one too many free software packages has caused a few glitches. First I have to turn off my pop-up protect so that I can use blogger (a must!), then I have to open my 'windows task manager' and end a tiny little process that my internet searches tell me belong to you, Mr. Norton. BECAUSE IT'S SUCKING UP ABOUT 98% OF MY CPU USAGE!!!!

I really can't get much of my work done that way. And my work, you see, is changing the world. I'm downloading photos, editing them, writing blogs posts and e-mails, and doing internet shopping to redecorate my house. You can see how (at least my corner of) the world is becoming a better place bit by bit!

Then, because I turned a piece of you off, I see this annoying little red icon with a "!" in it. This tells me that you want my attention. But, no matter how much attention I give you. No matter how many times I let you search for new updates or scan my hard drive, you persist. I can't do this anymore. You will have to be patient and wait your turn.

I used to be the kind of girl who would listen to you every time. The larger left brained part of me HAD to listen to you. But, I've been expanding the right side of my brain and it now tells me that I don't have to listen to pesky little you. I can go on my merry way, glimpsing blue sky, smelling blossoms, and listening to birds chirping.

Please understand.

Sincerely,

Cindi

Garage Sale!

I'm just sitting down for a few minutes here and there at the computer this week. No time to blog. I'm getting ready for the big weekend garage sale. I'm hoping to make enough money to buy this:


And to supplement our gas money for all of our beach trips!

Luxury Bed Sheets

This morning on the way to dropping the kids off for school, Sariah asked me, "What are bed bugs?" I managed to thoroughly confuse her on the matter as she kept correcting my descriptions by saying things like, "No, those are mosquitos." "No, those are moths." Thankfully, my bed does not harbor any of those little public health concerns. Which leads me to my topic ... bed sheets.

Back when I was going off to college, my mom gave me a primer in buying bed sheets. Never buy anything less than 180 thread count (TC). Less than 180 TC will pill up and be uncomfortable. Any of you parents ever bought the character sheets for your kids? Don't we know it! I think those sheets usually run about 130 TC. I'm obviously quite naive when it comes to sheets though, because I never put much more thought than that to buying them. I knew that there were "luxury" sheets selling for exorbitant prices. I thought maybe it was just the labeling?

Joseph and I have had our same sheets for a long time. I'm sure both sets are around 200 TC and 8-9 years old. One is a forest green color and the other a maroon color. I hate them. I must sound very fickle with my qualms about bed sheets when there are typhoons and earthquakes destroying everything in sight around the world. At least that's what I keep trying to tell myself. It hasn't worked so far as you will see.

I bought a set of sage green 200 TC sheets last week from Walmart. I walked around until I found the least expensive sheets and then made sure the thread count was acceptable. I was surprised to find that they even sell 130 TC sheets and they were more expensive than the ones I picked up! Then this weekend, I did a Google search for bed sheets, I can't remember why exactly, and ended up at Overstock.com. Wow! I never realized that there were 300, 400, 500, 600, 1000, even 1200 thread count sheets. A whole world has opened up to me that I never knew existed. I believe this is one of the reasons we are cautioned against too much web-surfing!

I looked around on there for a while and read some reviews. I learned that some people like sateen sheets rather than satin because with sateen, they don't fall out of bed. A hilarious mind-picture. I learned that high thread count sheets in cotton are a mess of wrinkles coming out of the drier. Some people iron, some people throw them on the bed, some people just live with the wrinkles because of the luxurious feel of their sheets, some people leave poor reviews that say, "DO NOT BUY THESE SHEETS!"

Well suddenly, my sage green 200 count bed sheets were not good enough for me. I picked them up and ran my hand over them. What? Is that a scratchy feeling? I can't sleep in that! I simply must have luxury sheets!! Plus Overstock.com is telling me that the retail price of these sheets is $199.99, but they are selling them for $46.99. My Walmart sheets were $11.00 for the flat, $11.00 for the fitted, and $5.50 for the pillowcases. About half of what I'd be paying for my luxury sheets. With shipping only $2.95, I decided to go for it. I chose ivory sheets with a 500 TC. They are on the way as I type...

P.S. From what I can tell, overstock.com's prices are really quite good if you are looking for high count bed sheets. It was a little tricky finding the size and color I wanted which is why I settle on ivory. Plus you can't beat their shipping. We are also considering buying some memory foam to get some more life out of our mattress. Those things are heavy and shipping is still only $2.95.

Doughnuts and gratitude

So, tonight I brought Krispy Kreme home for the Family Night treat. The kids were eating them, and Sariah says "Pretend we got these from a nice person. We would say 'Thanks for bringing the doughnuts.'"

All hypothetical, of course!

States and Countries

My kids are always wanting me to list the states and countries I have been to, so here goes:

Countries:

1. Guatemala (as a missionary)
   
2. Mexico (to visit my dad's childhood home)
   
3. El Salvador (unauthorized excursion as a missionary)
   
4. Canada (for a professional conference)
   

States:

1. Hawai'i (construction work)
   
2. California (construction work, professional conference, job interview, vacation)
3. Nevada (scouts)
4. Arizona (vacation, professional conference)
5. New Mexico (driving through)
6. Utah (lived there)
7. Idaho (vacation)
8. Montana (vacation)
9. Wyoming (vacation, scouts)
10. Colorado (vacation)
11. Texas (professional conference, work, visit relatives)
12. Oklahoma (driving through)
13. Kansas (driving through)
14. Nebraska (vacation)
15. South Dakota (vacation)
16. Minnesota (consulting)
17. Iowa (work)
18. Louisiana (professional conference)
19. Tennessee (consulting, professional conference)
20. Kentucky (consulting, vacation)
21. Illinois (vacation, professional conference, work)
    
22. Indiana (vacation)
23. Ohio (vacation, job interview)
24. Wisconsin (consulting, professional conference)
25. Michigan (lived there)
26. New York (vacation)
27. Maine (vacation)
28. New Hampshire (vacation)
29. Massachusetts (vacation)
30. Rhode Island (vacation)
31. Connecticut (vacation)
32. Pennsylvania (vacation, professional conference)
33. Maryland (professional conference)
34. Delaware (professional conference)
35. Washington, DC (professional conference)
36. Virginia (professional conference)
37. North Carolina (work)
38. South Carolina (professional conference)
39. Georgia (professional conference, vacation)
40. Florida (professional conference, vacation)

What's missing?

1. Alaska
2. Washington
3. Oregon
4. Missouri
5. Arkansas
6. Mississippi
7. Alabama
8. North Dakota
9. West Virginia
10. Vermont
11. New Jersey
    

Readability

This is just from my recollection in the late 1990s, not from original documents of the research on readability.

The first readability formulae were based on a small set of passages that had been rated as appropriate for specific grade levels by a single person in the 1930s. That set of passages, and the associated grade level ratings continued to be the benchmark against which the validity of all readability formulae were measured lasting into the 1990s. Most existing formulae, therefore, continue to be based on a single person's ratings of grade level appropriateness from 70+ years ago.

There are two basic measures in the vast majority of readability formulae:

• Vocabulary load, typically measured as (1) the percentage of words in a passage that do not appear on lists of frequently used words, or (2) the average length of words in a passage (in letters or syllables). Other measures are used as well. Each of these options has its own set of problems.
• Syntactic complexity, typically measured as (1) sentence length (in words), or paragraph length (in sentences). Other measures are used as well. Each of these also has its own set of problems.

When I was working for the BYU English Language Center on an educational software product called SoftRead, I programmed over 30 different readability indices into the software. There were about as many different measures of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity as there were readability formulae.

For the stats geeks like me, the typical methodology, and an oversimplified methodology at that, is to run a linear or non-linear regression of the benchmark readabilities (the criterion for validation is always an expert human judgment of readability) on the measures of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity. One has to wonder why readability formulae are used at all for legal purposes, since the ultimate validation criterion is expert human judgment of grade level.

In very simplistic terms, this is using a statistical procedure to estimate what is already an estimate given by a human. Pretty difficult to defend.

There are some more sophisticated approaches to readability, which essentially use the statistical sub-specialty of psychometrics using cloze tests (passages with a few words strategically removed where readers have to supply or select an appropriate word to fill in the blank) where passages are rank ordered statistically to identify harder passages and easier passages. Some of the problems with this is that the selection of words removed is very important and still remains a subjective portion of the procedure. One pro of this approach is that it does not rely on human judgment of passage level, even though it does rely on human judgment of what words should be removed. I tend to be more accepting of this type of readability formula, though still quite skeptical.

I thought I was going to do my dissertation on readability, until I decided that it was all smoke and mirrors, and I had better not base my future career on something I thought was not sufficiently valid to have a strong place in education.

Some of the reasons I came to that conclusion were the following:

• The genre of reading (e.g. story, information, poetry, test items, instructions) is typically not varied in the development of readability formulae. It is typically narrative (story) passages that are used to create the formulae, but then the formulae are applied to all kinds of genres. This is a very strong assumption that the relationship of vocabulary load and syntactic complexity can be extrapolated from the sample of passages to a completely different type of passage.
• The literature indicates that high vocabulary load and syntactic complexity are less important in predicting comprehension than people's level of interest in the subject of the passage.
• The literature indicates that at best readability identifies a rough level of comprehensibility, but should not be used to guide writing. When readability indices are used to guide writing, very complex writing may be done with short words and short sentences, be nearly incomprehensible, and show up as a very low level text (and vice versa).
• The literature is rife with applications of readability formulae to short passages, yet the literature is also full of cautions against using readability formulae to evaluate the reading level of short passages.

At the same time, I did notice something interesting about the measures of readability. Almost all measures of readability use in their formulae measures of the average (the average word length, the average number of words a common word list, the average sentence length, the average paragraph length).

None of the formulae look at variation in these measures (e.g. the standard deviation of word length, sentence length, paragraph length). It seems to me that changes in vocabulary load and syntactic complexity across different portions of a text would also change the comprehensibility of a text. I never carried out the study I had planned to include these things because I became convinced that even if I could achieve better relationships between computed (estimated) readability and expert ratings using these new indicators, I still could not overcome the issues described above.

Despite this, I think readability results probably give some useful information. I just wouldn't want to use it for anything important. Using readability formulae to satisfy curiosity is probably safe. Any type of evaluation really seems to be taking it too far for me.

I wonder how readable this post is. D'oh!

A $300 Haircut

Due to the fact that I was very tired yesterday from my decluttering efforts (and secretly due to the fact that I might be a little behind Joseph in value of services provided) and because he wouldn't pose properly for the before picture, I'm charging extra for my barber services. The supply and demand principles of economics were still in play. It was past closing time at Fantastic Sam's.

Before:


After:

Cheap Handyman

The other day when we pulled out of my Dr.'s office, Joseph saw a sign that said "Cheap Handimen." I looked over at him. I said, "I don't need a cheap handyman, I have a free handyman." He scoffed, "Your handyman isn't free, he charges $50.00 an hour." I'm pretty sure the amount of annoyance I felt didn't exude from my face. "Well," I retorted "I just hope that when all of the fees for the jobs we do are calculated, you don't owe me too much!"

Still, it's so nice to have a handyman! He's far from free (he came home yesterday with a new table saw), but he does gud wurk.

Remember my broken wall? He fixed it! Doesn't it look nice?





And yesterday he put shelves in the tops and bottoms of some of the closets. I'll keep him around.

Here's the before picture of Joseph's closet (names have been removed to protect the guilty):


Here are the after pictures:



Many of those binders actually contain my college notes, so they have yet to be dealt with.

The Wonders of GPS

Mapquest and AAA maps seem antiquated to me now. I don't have GPS on my phone, but Joseph does, and it was a great help on our recent vacation. Knowing that there are lots of jokes out there about men and directions, I made the comment to Joseph while we were driving one day, "GPS, made by men for men." Imagine their slogans, "Never lose face while driving again," or "GPS, the last word in all directional arguments." O.k., so those are kind-of dumb, but you get the picture.

A couple of days after I made that joke, I woke up to the fact that the voice for GPS is FEMALE! What do you make of that?

Squirrels

Growing up in Utah, we didn't see squirrels much unless we went to the mountains. When we moved to Massachusetts, I thought it was great that there were squirrels running around the back yard all the time. Our devil-cat Pepper, used to kill them and leave them as prizes on our door step.

Here in Michigan there seem to be about three species of squirrels running around and I now think of them as rodents, not cute, unless Brigham catches sight of one and gets excited. They eat up all of the suet cakes meant for the birds. They get into the garbage and also into our garden.

Today while driving down the road, one darted out to run across the road. If you've ever witnessed this, you know how crazy they can be, zipping back and forth trying to wrap their dumb little minds around the fact that there is danger and they should snap out of it and run to the side of the road. If I'm driving and I see wildlife (it happened in Florida when I saw a Great Blue Heron sauntering across the road), I usually slow or stop if possible, but I don't usually swerve. It would be useless to swerve with a squirrel anyway. In swerving, I'd probably hit it.

Long story short, I hit the squirrel with one of my back tires and it died instantly, contrary to the one my dad hit once that writhed and wriggled on the road for a while. My kids, who still like squirrels, were concerned and Sariah started singing the "Squirrels" song starting with, "Don't kill us squirrels." and continuing with, "We're cute and harmless, we are squirrels." Which brings me to my next point.

Who says squirrels are cute and harmless? I may have already blogged this story, but I don't want to go back and check. About nine years ago, when we were moving out of our apartment into our house, I was baking cookies in our apartment and since it was unseasonably warm, I opened the door so the sunlight could come in through the storm door. This crazy squirrel must have smelled the cookies from all I can guess because suddenly it hurled itself against the door. Then, it would run back some distance, get a running start and throw itself against the door again. Several more iterations! I don't call that cute. I don't call that harmless. That wretched, probably rabid squirrel is on my mind today.

Oh, the reason there's no picture to go with this post is because Joseph didn't want to get out of the van and take a picture of my road kill with my cell phone. The nerve!

Parents Unite: Class Action Law Suit

This morning as I was taking my shower, I picked up the bottle of shampoo to find that it was half empty (I'm still working towards being a half full kind of girl). It got me thinking about how I know that about a quarter of it had been dumped down the drain by a well meaning child just trying to get clean (there's my half full mentality kicking in!).

So, here's the thing. There are a lot of calculators out there that will tell you how much it costs to raise a child. Some of them include college and others don't. Figures go from well over $100,000 to above $300,000. I'm really hoping that none of my kids even come close to the 100,000 mark. But still, I wanna know, do they really understand my household? As astronomical as those figures are, do they take into account things like:

*Half bottles (or more) of shampoo gleefully dumped down the drain.
*A kid who somehow picks the nubbins off the ends of bobby pins and then snaps them in half.
*A karate kick to a window just to see how the window will respond.
*Sheets cut with scissors just for some scissor fun.
*Sheets cut with scissors just to get the scissor fun sister in trouble.
*A rock thrown at my windshield. Never mind the big trucks flipping rocks all over the road!
*Hoards of wrappers stowed behind a dresser (over 100 popsicles, packs of gum, string cheese, orange peelings, candy wrappers etc. all "stolen" food).
*Holes ripped in screens, chunks taken out of walls, large mirrors that crash down when the bathroom door slams, plus the ensuing medical bills for the child's foot that was under the mirror when it crashed.
*Cello strings overtightened, that same dang D string, twice. Cello music lost.
*Dental spacers broken b/c the wearer also chews legos for a hobby.
*Computer screen magnetized by some incredibly strong magnets.
*Extra water and laundry soap for a kid who pees the bed nearly every night.

I'm sure there are hundreds more. As time goes by, we try to laugh at these things, but that doesn't mean they don't give me brain shocks every now and then.

I'm thinking of drawing up a class action law suit, parents against kids. Anyone know a good attorney?

Feel free to add your own gripes in the comments section!