Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but when you're a mother you need sturdier companions. Here are my two best buddies:
And here's the wild thing who's much to blame:
Here's the tally: in the sugar while the midwife was here, in the flour while lunch was being made, in the flour again while I was writing a shopping list. (I thought it was too quiet to be true.) Maybe it's time to put the chain on the pantry door, I thought, but I'd forgotten that the chain had been wrenched out of the wall in some earlier incident.
7 comments:
Ai yi yi. My sympathies -- my 18mo is in a similar stage at the moment.
This morning I was almost done cleaning the toilet when she thumped in and stuck her hand in it. "Yucky," I said emphatically. "No hands in the toilet." Two of her older brothers came in. "Yucky," they told her. "Say yucky."
"Yucky," she said (more or less). And then she stuck her hand right back in the toilet.
My 2 year old recently dumped an entire gallon of olive oil on the floor. He is similarly talented at destroying kid proofing attempts.
We had some oil on the floor today too, but it was a comparatively minor incident -- nothing like the full bottle of balsamic vinegar he pulled off the shelf and shattered on the floor a few days ago...
These are the days, right?
Jamie, we like to say that Jack is a lot of crazy concentrated in a small package -- just add toilet water.
For the record, the girls made lots of messes too (I'll never forget the three day stretch when all my makeup was ground into their bedroom carpet) but they weren't as relentless as Jack in their search for new messes to make.
Where the wild things are indeed LOL! We haven't used a normal vaccum in over a year, simply shopvaccing the entire house as it's needed.
Suddenly my manic 2 1/2 year old doesn't seem quite so maniacal. He's just really loud. Really really loud.
Of course, we keep the flour in the basement and try to channel his messiness into playing in the mud outside. Then we hose him off.
It was the three month old who knocked my granola over, spraying it up the walls and all over the floor. He got an eight foot radius. Pretty good for three months.
I remember a 5 pound plastic pail of peanut butter smeared all over the kitchen, in the exposed brick, the screen door, the heat grate...
My 7th and 8th were both boys, 17 months apart. We called them the terror team. The nearly three year old would join in with the stuff the nearly 1 1/2 yr old would start, but he had greater powers of execution. The 18 month old would start knocking books off the bottom two shelves, but the 3 year old could get much higher up; in a couple of minutes they had several thousand books on the floor.
I admit I didn't count them. But we had a 20 foot wall of floor to ceiling bookcases and they emptied about half of it. I made them help me pick it up. I can't for the life of me remember whether I spanked them. I think it was, either help me, or sit on the stairs (our time out) as long as it takes me to pick them up. I am not against spanking but my experience with those two was that they were pretty impervious to anything that you would really want to do to a kid. Also I didn't trust myself when really angry, and when not angry it was hard to hurt my kids. They are both college graduates now, and employed, and one is married, so I guess it turned out OK in the end.
Susan Peterson
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