Perks & Downside

There are perks to being the Mom of a 7 year old boy.

They are generally pretty easy going and like to help around the house. This is especially true if it involves being paid in legos or hot wheels.

They are better at video games that their moms (ie me) and make great team mates for game night.

They give awesome hugs and have not yet figured out that it isn't cool to like your Mom and want to give her hugs.

As is true with all things there are also downsides. The worst of which, in my opinion, is what you find in their pockets (and therefore in the dryer on regular occassion). I don't know if this is true of all 7 year old boys, but my son has it in spades. He is a hoarder. A collector of all things his mom surely won't want to find in the dyer and a putter of those things in his pockets to be forgotten until the emerge in the lint filter or tumble around noisily until someone extracts them.

After a particularly bizarre finding that involved a ring pop I began to compile a list. Behold in all it's glory.

The list of things I have found in Alex's pockets
(not all of which were discovered before being washed and dried)

Gum
markers
pens
pencils
crayons
chocolate
hard candy
rocks ~ all sizes, all shapes (seriously I have enough of these to open my own landscaping company)
lighting balls (things that I can't even find on wikipedia, but my mother swears are what happens to the dirt where lighting hits the ground. They look a bit like a petrified seed pod)
keys
money
notes
kleenex
chapstick (most often found just after the dryer so it has had time to melt and become unusable)
transformer trading cards
gum wrappers
ring pop (only the plastic part remained)
sticks
screws
plastic orange juice seal
giant ball of wax (i kid you not it was the size of a jumbo superball)
kids dental flosser

I will continue to re-post and update the list and in the meantime let me know what your favorite perk of your kiddos is and what bizarre things you have found in their pockets.