A dirty bathtub means "great day".

At our house, one way to measure the success of the day is by seeing how dirty the bathtub is after the boys are done taking a bath. Let me tell you, today was an awesome day. Filthy bathtub, happy boys. I'm not sure what was so exciting about ripping around in the dirt/mud/sand/grass/etc. today, but the boys did it and had a fabulous time. Totally one with the earth, I tell ya.

Today's (non-dirt) adventures included a quick shopping trip where it was once again demonstrated that $3 will not buy as many toys at Walmart as it will at a garage sale. Why not? Well, let me explain it to you right here next to the Transformers action figures and the nice Wal-mart employee who is giggling at my speech.

Another adventure included our daily game of badminton, and figuring out that badminton rackets purchased at a garage sale aren't going to last us through this season because someone else has already whipped the crap out of them. Save money and compromise quality? Spend more on something that might last longer? Such lovely life lessons we are learning.

We also experimented a bit in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of puppy chow (you know, rice chex, PB, chocolate, powdered sugar...) and then Iggy suggested we put it in the freezer. Sure. Why not? Well, guess what? Experiment a success. Frozen puppy chow "tastes a miracle", which is the highest compliment Iggy and Ooky can give to anyone about their cooking.

Last but not least, we played another round of our favorite dessert game called Sweet 100. A yours truly invented game which requires a 1-100 chart (we have a large laminated one we found at a garage sale for a dime), some candy, a die, and some place markers. This is how you play: Mama lays the 100 chart on the floor (ours is 1-10, next line 11-20, and so on). Mama puts a small candy (M&Ms, Mike & Ikes, Smarties, etc.) on each number. Iggy and Ooky take turns rolling our (10 sided) die and move the number of spaces as detemined by the die. They can't take the candy unless they can identify the number they have landed on. Who knew that four year old Ooky had any clue what 86 or 57 or 39 were? Certainly not his mother. (Well, now she does...)I guess I'd never really asked him. The ultra cool thing was now that I am pretty sure they are pretty solid on identifying their numbers up to 100, I explained to them that they can figure out numbers all the way to 1000 now, since putting a 1 in front of 86 makes it... (and Iggy says " One hundred and eighty six!") Let's be tricky and make it a 2 in front of 86... (and Iggy says "Two hundred and eighty six!") and then I look over and Ooky has taken his dry erase board off the wall and is writing number and after number after number. Where the heck did all this come from??