I can’t count how many times someone’s called my first-grader a little Buddha. He’s an insightful little fart, often boiling down life’s tough stuff into the simplest terms from the backseat of my Hyundai. And he’s always unusually happy, even when his nose is bleeding like a scene from the Colosseum. One could argue that all first-graders have a happy nature, but that’s simply not true. I know, because my sixth-grader came out of the womb with her cup already half empty. (Boy, did THAT hurt. Rimshot!)

As a result of the constant flow of weird and wonderful things that come out of my son’s mouth, something awful happened: I became One of Those Annoying Moms Who Quotes Verbatim Conversations with Her Child on Facebook, like this one:

“Mom, I love you more than you love me.”
“Impossible. I love you times infinity.”
“Well, I love you times googol.”
Then, after much back and forth about I LOVE YOU googolplex, googolplex plus one, infinity plus infinity, he says, “Just kidding. I actually only love you about 10 percent.”

And this one:

“Mom, I think sometimes it’s better to be a kid than a grownup, because if you’re a kid and you punch someone, you just get in trouble. If you’re a grownup…JAIL.” 

And this picture:

With this caption:

“I think that guy really wants you to honk at him. It says, ‘Big Horn’ right there on the back, Mom.”

Look, I’m not saying he’s a total wizard, but he’s kind of growing on you, right?And sometimes he does make some amazing observations, about which I post things like this:

Playing a silly game of “what’s your favorite…” at bedtime, I asked my son, “What’s your favorite booger?” He said, “The not-bloody ones.” And when I laughed, he said, very seriously, “I’m not kidding. They’re gross. The blood tastes so bad on the booger!”

Indeed.

I could go on, but I won’t, because starting today, I’m just going to put the virtual microphone right under his chain. Today, Bitty Buddha wisdom, as dispensed to me from the back of my Hyundai and repeated to me for transcription when we got home–because he thought “we should probably put that on Google, to help people.”

I agree. Without further adieu…

HOW AND WHY TO MAKE A MEAN PERSON YOUR FRIEND

Hello, everybody. This is how you make a mean person into your friend. The reason you want to make them into your friend is because it’s hard to make friends with people who are mean. It’s really hard, because you think they’re so mean. That’s what most people think, so then the mean person doesn’t get friends, and they become sad. Try to make friends with them, so you don’t get hurt. But be careful, so you don’t get hit. These are the instructions:

First, you need to make friends with them.

Then, you need to help them become good, because friends normally obey each other and like to have fun, so he might obey you and be nice and be a good person.

Also, this is all how it started. Because I had a bloody nose at school, because another boy slapped me in the nose on accident. We were playing cops and robbers. He gets in a LOT of mischief almost every day. After the nosebleed, since I didn’t want to lose him as a friend—because it’s hard to make friends with people that are naughty—I had to make him better. I plan to stay friends with him so I can try to do that.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.