MAMA SAID THERE'D BE DAYS LIKE THIS. . .

As soon as I picked Aleita up from school yesterday, the first thing she told me is that she needed to wash her shoes. She said she had got them dirty while playing outside that day. I glanced at them and thought to myself that they really looked no worse than when I had sent her in them that morning, but getting into a debate with a three year old wasn’t at the top of my list at that given moment. Besides, I thought that maybe she was just meaning that she had wood chips or sand in her shoes from playing outside, which often happens (unfortunately, I almost always seem to forget to sit her down OUTSIDE and dump out her shoes, and then I end up with it all over the kitchen floor when she pulls them off.)

Thinking no more of it, we proceeded home. As soon as we were out of the car, Aleita again started in with the needing to wash her shoes thing. I was actually glad she reminded me, so that for one day, I wouldn’t have sand and/or wood chips all over the floor. I sat her down on the steps in the garage that lead into the house to pull her shoes off, and that is when I realized that she was quite accurate that her shoes, indeed, needed to be washed. I was also reminded that sometimes being a mom is quite literally, a crappy job. As soon as I pulled off her right shoe, it only took a glance at my hand to understand why she felt her shoes needed to be washed. You see, at some point during her day of playing at pre-school, Aleita had apparently stepped in dog poop.

Cleaning dog poop off the bottom of your kids’ shoes is one of those “mom” jobs that ranks right up there with cleaning up vomit or having to put your hand in the toilet to retrieve a dropped object. You go through most of your days, not even really thinking about “being an adult.” For me, the fact that I really am an adult doesn’t hit home when I am working at my job, parenting my kids, or in thinking about the ten years my husband and I have been married. No, adulthood tends to smack me in the face at those moments when I realize that I am the one who has to clean the dog poop off the shoe because that is what a mom does. As kids, we couldn’t wait to grow up so we could be adults and do the exciting things that adults do. If we had only known. . . .