When is the last time you reached you finger up your nose, picked out a big booger, and then smeared it all over the wall? Or found yourself swimming in freezing cold water for fun? Have you recently found yourself laughing hysterically at the mere mention of the word poop and fart (ok, I will admit to this)? Kids do a lot of strange things that leave us scratching our heads.
Between raising my own children and watching other children, I have noticed many things that only children do. Everyday kids are learning right from wrong, social graces, emotional control, and standing up confidently on their own two feet. They are all about instant gratification, and often children just do the first thing that pops into their head, leading to some particularly peculiar behavior.
Six Peculiar Things That Kids Do:
1.Inappropriate Booger Disposal: Lately it seems everywhere I turn there are dark green boogers smeared on my nice faux painted walls. There is no shortage of toilet paper or Kleenex in my home. There are bathrooms available where one could wash their hands. If children must dig their tiny fingers up their nose to retrieve those germ-ridden boogers, why can't they deposit them somewhere other than the wall? Have you ever tried to clean boogers off of walls? You practically need a pickaxe.
2.Running Everywhere: If your child needs to get something in the other room, they don't walk, they run! Apparently, children are the busiest people on earth because they need to get everywhere in haste. This is especially true for toddlers and preschool age children. My children run from one room to another all day long. One day my husband and brother-in-law decided they would try running instead of walking for an hour and they looked absolutely absurd. You should try it sometime if you need a good laugh. But somehow children are able to make it look normal.
3.Serial Lying: Oh I know, your kids don't lie. Newsflash -- your kids will lie right to your face and you won't even have a clue. I have four kids who all have varying degrees of difficulty with the truth. My oldest daughter once told a classmate that I make her eat candy all day or she gets in big trouble. She also told my neighbor that we were going on a big trip to Egypt. My other kids like to tell lies to get out of doing things they don't want to do like cleaning their rooms or brushing their teeth. Are they sociopaths? No, they just don't know yet how hurtful and destructive it is to lie to someone. And for that matter, some adults don't either.
4.Spitting Food Out: Kids find certain foods so disgusting that they just cannot bear to keep them in their mouths for another second or they will throw up. In our house that food is potatoes. There is an entire dramatic episode over just how gross that potato. My kids will repeatedly gag and show us the half-chewed food, make grotesque noises and faces until everyone at the table has properly lost their appetite. Imagine doing this as an adult: you are out to dinner with a friend who didn't enjoy their bite so they spit it out on the table.
5.Falling Down All Day: Perhaps it is because they are so busy running from place to place, but kids are always falling down. They spend a bulk of their day tripping and falling, and running into sharp corners that seem very avoidable. Somehow by the time we reach adulthood we have solved that falling down problem pretty well. You don't see too many adults walking around town falling on the ground every couple of minutes.
6.Seating Arrangement Drama: Can you imagine going out to dinner with your friends and yelling "I don't want to sit there! She's bugging me!" Why does it matter so very much to kids where they sit and who they sit next to? Before my family dines at a restaurant, we have pre-arranged seating assignments to avoid public outbursts.
Perhaps we should take a page out of kids' playbooks once in awhile and just not care about social etiquette. Most kids enjoy the simple pleasures of life and don't bother worrying about those little things that may waste time such as grabbing a Kleenex or eating food that doesn't feel just right in their mouth.
While I do not advocate lying at all, I believe kids imaginations are a wonderful thing, and sometimes they feel the urge to tell the world about their made-up travels to exotic lands.
We can learn so much from kids and their sometimes peculiar behavior -- how to live carefree like we did before being molded into upstanding citizens of the world.
But please grab a Kleenex little ones. I'm totally over booger spackle.
Find more from Megan Woolsey at The Hip Mothership, Facebook and Twitter. .