you can't sit on the couch with a bare bottom.
get your feet out of your brother's mouth.
don't put things in the toilet.(i know there are far more ridiculous examples, but it is late and i am drawing a blank. i hope you'll add other "mom-isms" in the comments. i can't be the only one shaking my head at things which should go without saying and yet somehow don't.)
some days, much of my parental instruction has to do with policing appropriate food choices. you gotta set up parameters; kids are like wild dogs and will put absolutely anything in their mouths:
we don't eat dog food.
we don't eat things we find on the floor.
we don't eat things we find outside.it all pretty much boils down to: "don't eat anything mommy or daddy didn't give you recently." (Lord knows that that last part is clutch--who knows how long those raisins have been collecting dust under the couch?)
i'm learning, however, that some rules were made to be broken--especially the "not eating things we find outside" one.
a perk of living in wide open spaces is the ability to eat some of the things we find, like blackberries, dandelion greens, or morels. friends of ours are more ambitious gatherers; their family adventurously collected bushels of peaches and wild grapes this week. their generosity meant sticky, juice-stained baby faces at dinner and hot peach crisp for dessert.
we also ate the most delicious marinated, grilled mushrooms that jim foraged. (don't worry, he has a manual--they weren't poisonous.) ohmygoodness, they were so good that we "ate them whole thing!"--even jim and dylan. (that is one of dylan's holdover baby sayings that we can't bear to correct:)
to recap:
sometimes we eat things we find--just not so much from the bottom of the car.
