1. If your son decides to eat some fruit, make sure he doesn’t leave 1/4 of a watermelon sitting out where your puppy can eat it…rind and all.

2. When you are driving a car to Chicago that is on loan from a very nice company (Hi Chevy!) you may want to make sure you know where the windshield wipers are before you go driving in the rain.

3. And, when removing a very heavy, rear seat from said car, make sure you don’t let it swing down and hit you in the ovary.

4. The summer breeze through the screen door isn’t quite as bug-free if your five month old, 50 pound puppy goes right through it to get to the mailman.

5. Ironing on a humid day is not fun.

6. No matter how prepared you are for a trip out of town to meet a thousand people, you will never be prepared for the zit you’ll get. In your eyebrow.

7. If you think the Vietnamese people at the nail salon are talking about you, that’s because they are.

8. No matter how crazy your kids make you and no matter how much they fight, when they are not home the silence will be deafening and you’ll miss them a lot.

9. When you are on a sugar-free diet and there is homemade wine in your refrigerator, it’s pretty much torture.

10. No really. Ironing totally stinks.

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I will never claim to be a petite flower. I am 5’10” and have palms that make Meadowlark Lemon look like an extra from The Wizard of Oz. Also, you know you’re old when the first basketball player that comes to mind is Meadowlark Lemon.

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In our house, we discuss faith a lot. We attend mass regularly, I work at the Catholic school where both kids are students and we often pray as a family. When the children are older, we’ll probably drink beer and play bingo together…because, that’s what we Catholics do.

But it seems I have more explaining to do in the faith department, because as we passed a cemetery the other day, my seven year old son asked, “Mom, is that heaven?”

No son, that’s where people walk their dogs and don’t pick up the poop.

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Yesterday morning, my seven year old son was playing in our back yard. I looked out the window to see him talking to himself…non-stop.

I watched for a few minutes then I walked outside and asked, “Who are you talking to?”

He replied, “My friends.”

“What friends?”

He held out his arm and pointed toward the garage, “The cars. The cars are my friends.”

I found this oddly comforting. Not the fact that my son was going all David Hasselhoff on me, but because these friends of his were real objects.

When my daughter was young, she had an entire entourage of imaginary friends. Friends we couldn’t see. We would get in a lot of trouble when one of them was sitting on the couch and we didn’t realize it. For the record, you can smash something that isn’t even there.

Her favorite friend was Simba. Simba went everywhere with us. Simba ate with us, watched TV with us and even ran errands with us.

And, one time, we accidentally left Simba in a church pew.

After Mass, as the entire congregation was beginning to exit the church, we stood at the back of the building trying to comfort our crying daughter who was throwing a fit because we were leaving her friend behind.

Trying to talk sense into her did no good. Our little girl was crushed. So we did the only thing we could think of doing. People watched as my husband walked back to our empty pew, grabbed at the air, “picked up” Simba and delivered him to our daughter’s waiting arms.

Now do you see why I’m happy about my son’s new friends? You can’t take an SUV to church. Though I will say, his friends do cost more to feed.

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