Fun with five-year-olds

Last night I was on the phone with a friend of a friend and she asked me how old my children were. "They're five," I said. "Oh, that's a wonderful age," she said enthusiastically. "Yes," I said, not quite as enthusiastically. "Yes, it is."

Five years old is a wonderful age -- I'm enjoying it much more than three or four. But I've come to the conclusion that my boys will always be a little challenging. Take what happened this morning. I was going through the house looking for their laundry, especially socks. They've kind of gotten the idea that pants, shirts, and underwear go in the hamper, but they tend to shed their socks wherever they are at the moment and then absentmindedly kick them under pieces of furniture.

I came to the blue chair and decided to take it completely apart to search for socks. Here it is before I began (actually it was messier than this, but I had to recreate the scene for photographic purposes):

Here it is with the cat blanket pulled aside:

No socks, so I decided to look under the cushion.

Do you see something, tucked way down? It was actually much harder for me to see, because the light wasn't on (and I didn't have the camera's flash going off). But I saw something. So I reached down and pulled it out.

We have been LOOKING for this jar of honey for WEEKS! We go through a lot of honey in this house, since it's our favorite cure for coughs. The boys also like to eat it on toast and waffles. I just knew there was another jar of honey around, and I could not figure out what could have happened to it.

Five years old. A wonderful age indeed.