Luke recently acquired a small American flag. This procurement has brought him much joy and amusement...and a new object of blasphemy.

He's done some adorable things with this flag, like when he put it at the top of the tower he built with legos. He's stood on the curb in front of our house, waving it at the cars passing by, claiming that he was helping the cars "win the race".

A couple of times this week, he's propped the stick of the flag over his ear, in the same manner you would store a pencil. "Look, Mommy," he'd say, "I have an American ear!" I'd give him a hearty courtesy laugh, and he'd be on his merry way to snatch whatever toy was making George happy at that moment.

The fact that he was attaching the flag to any part of his body should have made me very nervous. This is, after all, the same child I found a few weeks ago on our back porch, his pants around his ankles, holding the empty wrapping paper tube he had been sword-fighting with, and urinating into it.

This morning, when Luke was finished with his bath, I helped him dry off and told him to go to his room and put his clothes on. I continued to flat-iron my hair, and a few minutes later, my son, naked as a jaybird, burst into my bathroom.

"Luke," I said, "You are supposed to be getting dressed for Mother Goose!"

"Look at me, Mommy!" he shrieked with glee.

"I see you, you're na-" I was cut off by my utter disbelief.

Luke turned around abruptly to reveal the Stars and Stripes, the subject of our national anthem, nestled snugly between his cheeks.

"Mommy, I have an American..."

"DON'T SAY ANOTHER WORD. TAKE THAT FLAG OUT OF THERE AND GO GET DRESSED!" I shouted.

As he ran off, I laughed so hard, I nearly had a stroke.

The End

Mother Goose

Yesterday was Thursday, and Thursday is Mother Goose Story Hour day. One time I mentioned MGSH to someone in a conversation, and he stared back at me, all wide-eyed, and asked "Mother Goose Story Hour? WHAT'S THAT?" If you're not as dumb as him, congratulations. You can skip to the next paragraph. If you are as dumb as him, Mother Goose Story Hour is a program at our library where a woman dressed up as Mother Goose reads stories to children.

Honestly, at our library, it is so much more than that. The children have show and tell, they sing songs with hand movements, there are puppets, stories, and at the end, they have a parade through the book shelves to the music room, where they play little instruments. Our Mother Goose is a radiant senior citizen who dresses up in crinolines and pinafores, and a flowered bonnet, and carries a goose. She has gorgeous silver hair that she wears bobbed, a thick Mississippi accent, and ever-present red lipstick. A veteran kindergarten teacher, she sings most of her words, she loves the kids and focuses a lot on manners. In fact, before the children can go in, the boys have to line up opposite the girls, hold out their hands, and ask, "Ladies, would you like to go in first?" To which the girls are supposed to reply "Yes, thank you," with a curtsy.

On Mother Goose Story Hour days, we focus heavily on having our hands and faces scrubbed clean, our hair combed neatly, teeth brushed to a polish, clothes clean and neat, and above everything else, I insist the boys wear their whitest socks. (They have to take their shoes off to sit on the story rug.) We practice "Yes, ma'am" and "Fine, thank you. How are you?" over and over during our drive into town.

As you can imagine, Luke typically uses story hour to make me look like a deadbeat. He never uses "Yes, ma'am" or "Fine thank you, how are you?" He mumbles during show and tell. One day, he was bent on interrupting Mother Goose every two seconds without raising his hand. The most embarrassing time was when Mother Goose read a poem about gum, and she made it pretty clear that she thought gum was disgusting. She went on and on and on about the noise, the germs, how gross it is to find it on the ground, etc. As soon as she was done, Luke blurted out, "MY MOMMY LIKES TO GIVE ME GUM!" The horror!

Yesterday, I got a break from being humiliated during story hour. I got to sit back in my seat while another mother was sold up the river. After Mother Goose handed out Safety Pops, another staple of Thursday mornings, she warned the kids not to open their "suckahs" in the library. "Did you know that last week, there was a little girl who opened hers in the library and started eating it? Mmm, MMM!" she huffed, "Can you believe that?"

"Yes, I can believe it," the woman she was looking at answered, "It was my child."

Mother Goose, being the perfect southern lady, was horrified that she had made such a gaffe. She turned beet red, and apologized and said she should have made the child in her story a boy. All eyes were on the mother of the greedy little rotten child who dares to open suckers in the library. I sat and smiled in my seat, pleased as punch that I had gotten to fly under the radar for a day.

Next week, Luke will surely think of some way to pay me back for the week that he was an angel. I'm anticipating a pants-wetting episode, or nose picking during show and tell.

So now are you totally jealous that your town doesn't have our Mother Goose? Well, you're in luck, because Mother Goose is on YouTube:

Bedtime Shenanigans

Tonight, we had leftovers for dinner. The boys had pork chops with Spanish rice (or "Bullfighter Casserole" if you're a toddler in my house), and Chicken Parm for the adults. As I was getting the kids' plates dished up, I asked my husband if he would like me to reheat ours after the children went to bed, affording us a dinner alone--something we've been fantasizing about. He was game for waiting, so that's what we did.

While we were eating, I heard giggling coming from the boys' bedroom. Ignore it, you're having a romantic leftovers dinner alone with your husband, said the little voice in my head. So I ignored it for a while. After a few more minutes, my curiosity overpowered me and I was headed upstairs to check it out.

Standing outside their door, I realized that Luke was not in his bed, but in George's crib. I stood there for a minute listening to them and trying to stifle my own laughter. And then I whipped out my camera phone and started recording (you can't see them, but you can hear them):

And then a minute later, it sounded like this:

If you couldn't understand what you were hearing, Luke was telling George around 12 seconds that we're going to have pancakes in the morning.

Oh fiddlesticks*, I thought, Why did I read Curious George Makes Pancakes to them at bedtime? Now Luke's gone and told George that we're having pancakes in the morning!

You remember when Luke got Curious George Makes Pancakes, right? No? You have your own life? Oh, right.

Anyway, I tiptoed downstairs and finished my dinner while Joe and I laughed over the videos. A few minutes later we heard footsteps upstairs and assumed the fun was over. A few minutes later, while Joe was at the bottom of the stairs getting his coat to take the dog on a walk, he saw Luke standing at the top.

"Can you tell George to quit picking my nose?" he asked with a preemptively grateful smile on his face.

"Can I tell George to quit picking your nose?" Joe repeated.

I butted into the conversation. "George can't pick your nose if you're in YOUR bed," I pointed out.

The smile faded from his face as the wheels started turning and he realized he'd been busted. What did he think, that it was going to go over our heads and we were going to march upstairs and enforce a "No Picking Your Brother's Nose" rule, then go back downstairs and resume picking the bugs out of each other's hair and eating them?

Kids--they're not the brightest.

Well, I hate to cut this short, but it is now two and a half hours after the time I put them to bed, and Luke has just been caught "practicing going up the stairs backwards." Bye.

* Sometimes you have to edit your inner monologue when your mother reads your blog.