Ohhh, my head!

Migraines are the bane of my existence.

And I was fully prepared to write about my last six days of crappy life, but then I figured: really, who cares? Pain, blah blah blah, more pain, blah blah blah, morphine... ahhhh. That pretty much sums it up.

Something MUCH more important in the grand scheme of things are boys and their germs. When in the course of evolution did it become okay for boys to not be disgusted by ANYTHING? I mean, little girls seem not to like (DISCLAIMER: Typically. I have no hands-on direct experience except from my god daughters who are the girliest girls EVER) to be dirty or slimy or sticky. Boys, on the other hand, seem to consider extra goop and muck part of their natural habitat.

Italo (the new teenager I mentioned before) had been sentenced to all-white uniform shirts for his entire elementary school attendance. Other colors are allowed (blue, and just recently yellow), but he always came home FILTHY... bleach was required and didn't always help - hence the white uniform shirts (he once came home with the alphabet written backwards in permanent marker on his brand new shirt). After literally years of begging, we let him wander into the color spectrum this year. He wanted to be cool and wear the blue pin-striped pullovers (that remind me of pre-school uniforms, but, hey, what do I know?) that hide the fact that you forgot your belt for the 4th time this week. And I really tried to make it work for him. I reminded him DAILY that he needed to come home relatively clean - at the very least not permanently stained. Well, suffice it to say that he's been using up his "wearable" stash of uniform shirts and is down to about 3 decent ones (not great, just decent). So he's once again been sentenced to white uniform shirts. Sucks for his coolness next year.

And that's just shirts we're talking about. Don't even get me started on his pants, socks, SHOES, hair (how hard can it be to thoroughly wash 1/4" long hair?), face, and skin. It just seems to him a natural thing to be dirty.

Little Joe... well, he's a horse of a different color. That boy wants to keep his hands clean at all times - and that's it. Everything else is apparently fair game. My mom used to give me dirty looks all the time because when we could come over (when we were only a family of four), I would look fine and Italo would look fine and JC would look fine but Little Joe would be... gross. Until, during my c-section convalescence last year, she got a first-hand view of getting Little Joe ready to go out.

It's not like you can really pin down what he does. It's more like magic... dirty magic. One minute, you've dressed him in a pair of cute jean shorts with white socks and his favorite Buzz Lightyear sneakers topped off with a tan dinosaur button up shirt - the next minute he looks like one of those kids on the "Adopt a Kid" commercials asking for $19 a month to feed a child. He's sticky, slimy, has some kind of food stuck and dried on the middle of his shirt, and is in the process of eating, no, SAVORING one of his own boogers. I used to tell my mom about Little Joe's dirty magic. I wasn't letting the whole second-child-isn't-as-xxxxxxx-as-the-first happen to me. I was taking care of both of them the same way. She never believed me because Little Joe always looked like a little street urchin. Now she's a believer. And this happens almost every day. Still. And I still can't figure out his dirty magic. It's a talent really, if a talent could be named where getting dirty was important or impressive.

And Nestor, well, he's a baby. I caught him "sharing" his cereal with the dog the other day... I think the dog got more cereal and Nestor got more dog drool. Enough said.

Just my dirty musings of the day... boys really are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. They just didn't tell you to look at the fine print...

BOYS ALSO INCLUDED WITH AND NOT NECESSARILY LIMITED TO: boogers, grass, sharpies, spaghetti stains on new white shirts, cool new rocks to break the vacuum, boogers, dead bug collections to be found as a surprise in the underwear drawer, random bottle caps, rusty nails, boogers, chewed-on pencil erasers, play-doh, gum in the dryer, and did I mention boogers?