How could you possibly ever get mad

at a cute three-year old who bursts into the song Jesus Wants Me for a SunBEAM just as you’re about to throttle her for:

throwing the mother of all tantrums when you accidentally (on purpose, but, you know) flush the toilet so the smell will subside when she WASN’T FINISHED YET, and screaming “Mommy, you’re STOOPID” with the snot/slobber stream dripping down to her shirt for ten minutes. And speaking of apologizing–well, you can try it, but if it clearly would be rational to accept the apology over this admittedly tremendous wrong done and move on, forget it,

or

‘helping’ Mom by getting a crust of bread out of the trash to feed her baby sister,

or

lying about a little peepee accident so that when the nice man comes to fix the dishwasher and mommy sees a little puddle of yellow on the floor right by his knee she hopes it’s apple juice until she remembers that we don’t have apple juice right now,

or

unzipping the couch cushions and pulling out handfuls of stuffing,

or

fibbing (lying seems so harsh, somehow) about another potty accident that involved her baby sister trailing through the puddle with her too-long footie pajamas,

or

saying “I don’t like you mommy, I love you,” over and over and over, while trying to hand me my water bottle as I do something else with both hands. (Crave attention much?)

A few thoughts: 1) Apparently Susan has potty (not to mention honesty) issues, 2) that last one isn’t so bad, I guess, and, most importantly, 3) it’s pretty clear to me that we need to reach a consensus on what it means to be a “Sunbeam.” Because, so far, it’s not doing much for me, and I don’t know if that’s what Jesus had in mind either.

In case you were wondering, all of these things, in addition to the usual random kiddie-ness, happened in the past 36 hours. Dang, I love being a mom!!