Today, thanks to a mental nudging brought on by MOMflippedisWOW’s “Muddy Memories” entry, I will share two Miss Language and Mud stories, and one Miss Dance Mud story. Unfortunately they occurred before the dawn of digital cameras.
The first was when she was about two. We were walking home from town when she fell in a mud puddle. She did not like mud. She had mud on her hands, clothes, face, and in her hair. She wailed at the top of her lungs the rest of the way home, screaming, “Naughty, naughty mud!”
Only some hours later did I realize, her vocabulary was so clean, “naughty” was the very worst thing she knew of to call the mud. She was cursing it out the best she could. 
Then, about two years later, we were picnicking at the local park. Miss Language and Devastatingly Handsome were standing chatting with some adults right along the edge of the lake. Devastatingly cautioned her to be careful not to fall in. And then a minute or two later, he swung around without taking notice of her position, and knocked her smack into the slimy mud on the edge of the lake, face down. I particularly remember the mud in her nostrils. Yuck.
She was not a happy camper but submitted calmly to being cleaned up as much as possible using only baby wipes. Lots of baby wipes.
Miss Dance’s Mud story is completely different. Birthday parties at our place have traditionally worked around a theme chosen from anything by the birthday child. The year Miss Dance turned, I think it was, 4, she chose Mud as her theme. Her birthday is not warm enough to be outside in the mud, so we came up with inside things. We fingerpainted with chocolate pudding. We made plaster of paris handprints. We watched a Reading Rainbow about mud racing and a claymation story about a piggie stuck in the mud. And we made the famous Oreo dirt cake, served complete with gummi worms, much to my nephew’s dismay.
