Attack of the Washcloth

I have a lot of photographs of me as a child where my hair is a knotted mess. It wasn't that I never brushed my hair. I did. Well, my mom did. But my hair never stayed brushed for more than thirty minutes, I swear.

My boys don't have long hair. Even Nate, who has hair that sticks right up, has his hair cut short so that I don't have to wrestle with it each day. Because there is no point.

Now I know there are children out there that are kept neat and clean. They wear clothes that match and keep their hair in pig-tails or braids, and when they drink their milk or eat their food they either do so very carefully or wipe after each bite, because their faces are always clean.

These kids are robot children purchased by uppity snobs to make the rest of us look bad. Or maybe just me. Maybe I'm the only one that will now look bad. Maybe I'm that paranoid.

Because my kids always have food on their faces and stains on their clothes (which are too big or too small or ripped and never match). When the boys finish eating I need to chase them down to wipe faces and hands, but I really do have to chase them. And when I catch them I have to struggle to hold them and get all the food off a moving target with eyeballs while ignoring the high pitched scream it is emitting. Nine times out of ten, once I finish wiping, the boy will immediately go back for another round of jam, or decide to brush his teeth (toothpaste!)

And clothing, too. Seriously, Nick rips the knees of his pants faster than I can replace his pants. And most of his shirts are stained. Thanks to the Easter Bunny and lack of listening to me about putting the silly putty back in the egg, we just lost another round of clothes to a laundry disaster.

I watch other kids eat, and I wonder why they are so neat. "You have boys!" many of them say. But it can't just be that. Not all boys would rather walk around with pizza sauce in their hair than let their mothers wash it out with a washcloth. Would they?