Firetrucks, and more poop

Today was the firetruck parade in Glendale, so we decided to shirk all other duties this Saturday, and go to the parade. We had beautiful weather-overcast in the mid 80's. Highlights include-parking by a candy factory and picking up some treats for the parade, sitting by a Mexican restraunt and getting more treats for the parade, watching Tanner reach for a group of golden retrievers to pet them while his sisters cowered in their chairs and the owners tried to pull the dogs away, lots of loud sirens that Tanner mimicked. While we are not overly patriotic people, I do believe in showing respect to the flag and standing up when the color guard passes. So we all stood up and covered our hearts and then started anticipating the beginning of the parade. The problem we had was that every group of military recruits, every VFW group, every boy scout troup had their own color guard. Do you stand up for every one? I was grateful for the one cub scout troop that only had their troop flag, so I didn't have to worry about it.

This afternoon we were busy making and cleaning up messes. While I worked on a costume for Zoe, Molly was working on something for Heidi. I should have been more aware of what was going on, I quickly became aware when Molly started crying because she had accidentally cut through Zoe's sheets. We put away the scissors, mended the hole and then headed to the back yard to clean up the mess that was left this morning. Molly had tried to clear the dishes, but had lost her grip and everything had tumbled to the ground. We had to do some sweeping and hosing to clean up the mess. Molly did not have a chance to squirt the hose (mostly because she was inside until she saw the project was getting fun). I devised another get wet project-Molly and Zoe could scrub off the outside table and then squirt it down. They very quickly began to fight over who got to clean off the crayon (the non crayon mess was essentially bird poop.) Zoe ended up storming off when Molly wouldn't concede her ground, and Molly ended up with the responsibility for the whole project. After hearing her fake sobs for a few minutes I went outside. She got more mad for me being there, so I finally gave her a talk. I assured her that life was full of poop. This got her attention. I told her I would love to guarantee that she would never have to deal with it, but for every fun task there are a lot more poopy ones. As I was talking I was wiping down bird poop. She started to cry again and got mad when I was behind her chair. She asked haughtily what I was doing. When I told her I was wiping the poop off the back of the chair so that she wouldn't get it in her hair when she slumped in the chair as part of her tantrum she immediatly stopped crying. While I had been speaking to her metaphorically, I don't think she realized until that moment there was real poop in the story. That ended the rant. The table got cleaned off, the girls played in the hose and pool and all was well until our next crisis (Trip to Gilbert to help a patient who banged a tooth-other docs are in priesthood session and not available.)

Side note: Reed and I went out for dinner last night. Tanner threw up for the sitter.