Before I had children of my own, I never spent a lot of time with really little kids. I saw my nieces sometimes, and I babysat a little when I was in high school, but basically, I only saw kids in passing. And I hate to say it, but I honestly thought the cute and tidy kids I saw on TV or in magazines were pretty true to life. Yeah. Dumb.
Kids are DIRTY. We just get SO DIRTY all the time. And I know I wrote about this before, but I just can't get over it. The three of us are like Pig-Pen, the character from the Peanuts cartoons who's always enveloped in a cloud of dust. But guess what? I really, truly, do not mind. I want my kids to have fun and I'm pretty sure kids think dirt=fun.
So this is us. Dirty, snotty, messy haired. . . but still cute!
Real life.
I love the kids faces in this and I even kind of love that I didn't quite make it into the photo.
And poor Norah. Who can blame her for being gross all the time? She's in that exploratory 1 year old stage; she wants to go everywhere, touch everything. The blooming tulips and new hostas are too tempting for her NOT to crawl through a bed of mud and leaves.
Though I am happy to say that pretty soon after these photos were taken, I decided giving everyone a long bath would be the best use of our time, so the kids went to bed all clean and shiny and happy. Post-bath squeaky clean kids are pretty cute too.