The Creative Daughter

I have this daughter. I love her very, very much.

I love her very, very much.

Sorry. Sometimes I have to repeat things.

Back to this daughter. I actually have two daughters, but this is the only one who is two right now.

Two is going to be the death of me. That, or it will send me running for the mental institution.

Why isn't mommy in any pictures when I was two?

It's because she checked herself into the mental institution and didn't come out until you were seven.

Harper's had her fair share of, um, creative days.

But last Saturday, I was guilty of letting Harper play quietly upstairs alone for about 10 minutes. In what I thought was her playroom, with what I assumed were dress-up clothes. Little did I know that either my Hot Husband or I had left the door to our bedroom open. Dane went up to check on her upstairs, and then I heard the words no mother of a creative 2 year old ever wants to hear:

"Mom! Harper got into the nail polish!"

No. The 30 bottles of nail polish in the zippered bag, in the drawer in the vanity in the master bathroom? Why would my precious, sweet girl bypass the room full of age appropriate toys, the dress up clothes and Duplo blocks and baby dolls, to dig around in her parents' bathroom and play with the NAIL POLISH??

No. Nonononononono.

I found her at the top of the stairs, proud as can be. I quickly picked her up, my arms straight out in front of me, carrying her to the shower.

Girlfriend had painted herself from her toes to her knees, her tulle dress-up skirt, her hands, and her face with (at least) four different colors of nail polish. Nail polish is all over the carpet in my master bathroom. The good news is, Harper is advanced in the area of fine motor skills. I can't even get those bottles open half of the time.

What. Am. I. Going. To. Do. With. This. Girl.

A couple other tidbits for the Harper Files?

Yesterday morning after I had gone to work, Brandon came downstairs at 7am to find that Harper had body-slammed her way through the baby gate to get into the kitchen, and was holding three half eaten hot dogs in her hands from the refrigerator. We have no idea how many she ate before Brandon found her. Three. Cold cheese hot dogs. At 7am

I wish cold hot dogs are the worst thing we have busted Harper eating from the fridge.

Yes, that is a stick of butter.

I love her very, very much. I love her very, very much. I love her very, very much.

In My Defense, At Least They Were Clean

Have I mentioned lately that I am loving my new job? I usually work only two days a week, which leaves us with a lot more time together as a family than we had been enjoying.

Last Friday was just such a day. I was home from work, Brandon was home from work, and we decided it was the perfect day to run a couple of errands together with the girls, and pick up some pieces for the kids Halloween costumes.

I know it's still September and 100 degrees in Houston today, but I am lighting my pumpkin candle, shopping for Halloween stuff, and WILLING the cooler weather to come. It WILL come. I WILL get to turn my air conditioner off (or at least adjust the temperature) sometime in the near future.

Back to Friday. We're running around the house, getting shoes on the girls and bows in the hair. Loading up the diaper bag and the sippy cups. Grocery list in the purse. I realize the new shirt I am wearing is cut a little lower than I had hoped, and decided to just throw one of my black tank tops under it real quick. As Brandon is loading the kids in the van, I rummage through the four loads of clean laundry in my living room, finally finding the black tank I was looking for, and quickly layer it under my new shirt before running out the door.

First stop? Our local costume store. For Halloween costumes? No, for face make up for a video Brandon is doing for church. I love our church and how well they indulge in my husband's creativity. Brandon was in this same costume store just last month, buying up "strong man wresting costumes" for the last video they did at church. He's in their so often, in fact, that the costume-store-guy recognizes him on sight and they chat about the church and the video and how Halloween business is at the costume store. Nothing like a little "spontaneous evangelism" while shopping for fake blood.

We wandered along, browsing the aisles, Brandon, Harper, Emerson, and me. And the costume-guy. We marveled at how many different costumes they could make for women that basically consisted of thigh-high stockings and something strapless up top.

Suddenly, costume-man stops in the aisle. Something in the aisle has caught his eye. We follow his gaze to see a pair of ladies panties in the floor. A pair of black, lacy ladies panties. Not really something practical, more like something that resembled the much more "adult" costumes in the other room of the costume store.

"Um, are these yours?" he says as he picks up the corner of the undies by his fingertips.

"No." I replied. Of course not.

"Woah! Maybe they're from one of the costumes. Maybe they were left in the dressing room or something!" my husband suggests.

"Hey, Misty! Check out what I found on the floor just now!" Costume-store-girl is not going to believe this.

Then I squint my eyes a little, and realize the object between his fingertips looks a little...familiar. My mind frantically goes back to those hurried moments of riffling through the laundry pile moments before leaving the house, and throwing on the black tank top before rushing out the door. Apparently, the little black tank top had a little black buddy static-clinging along for errand day, determined to make their costume-store debut to a slightly larger audience than they were accustomed to. I made a mental note to promptly fold and put away all clean laundry immediately from this day forward.

I started hyperventilating and sweating a little bit, as the costume-store guy walked away with my undies firmly in his grasp, saying a little prayer that my obvious distressed state would not reveal the true ownership of the surprise visitor. We continued to shop for a few more minutes, finally selecting just the right fake blood for Brandon's latest project, as my husband chatted to the oh-so-helpful employee/ underwear-finder about our church and our Halloween plans. To my credit, I made it all the way back to the van without vomiting. I debated never telling Brandon that the panties were mine, but then I realized I haven't blogged about anything other than qtips and football players in a while, and it's been even longer than that since I've used the internet to horrify my grandmother.

Please, please tell me that these things do not only happen to me. Please tell me that you, too, have unintentionally left a pair of saucy underwear in the costume store for an employee to find next to you and your small children while he was discussing fake blood options with your husband, the local youth minister.

Happens to everyone. Right?

I Feel Like This Is Part 2 Of A Very Unfortunate Series...

...called Things Harper Does to Drive Her Mommy Crazy While Her Daddy is Out of Town.

Brandon has been gone for a week and so far she has:

-Dumped 500 q-tips in the toilet.

-Thrown an entire roll of toilet paper into the toilet. Still on the roll.

-Ripped her curtain rod completely out of the wall after being put to bed for the night.

-Woken up early and sampled some brownies for breakfast, before decorating herself with a pink marker I didn't know we had. Before church this morning.

Yes, she is wearing Emerson's panties over her diaper.

-Snuck out into the backyard with her sister (mommy was upstairs with the boys while the girls were watching a movie), stripped down to her birthday suit, and went skinny dipping in the plastic wading pool.

Definitely ready for Hot Brandon to come home tonight. I don't think I can face another naked, brownie-smeared, marker-colored Harper alone in the morning.

How a Princess Became a Queen

Once Upon a Time, in a home a long, long time ago, a cute little chubby-legged girl playfully crawled all over her house making mischeif where ever she went. Her parents thought she was so cute, pulling up on the coffee table and digging around in the Christmas gifts. What a little trouble maker! Nudge nudge, smile smile.

And the Princess of Destruction was born.


Fast forward a year and a half. The chubby-legged baby is now a skinny two year old. A very strong-willed two year old, who, every now and then, makes me long for the days when Aidan was two. In the last two weeks, Harper has:

-climbed out of her crib every night, multiple times at bedtime. I spend about an hour putting her back in her bed every night before she finally falls asleep.

-woken up, almost daily, before 6am. It is not unusual for me, lately, to wake up to a little voice next to my bed saying "Good morning, Mommy. Harper get out of bed."

-climbed out of her bed at night and eaten half a tube of Desitin cream.

-climbed out of her bed at night and, with Emerson, unwrapped and used an entire package of bandaids all over their bodies.

-climbed out of her bed at night, stripped her clothes and diaper off, and smeared an entire tube of Boudreaux's Butt Paste all over her naked body, face, and hair.

- climbed out of her bed, changed out of her pajamas and into a sundress and sandals, and then climbed back into her bed.

-woken up pre-6am, gone down to the pantry, and poured an entire bottle of dried oregano all over the floor, herself, and her beloved blankie. My vaccuum now smells like oregano FOREVER.


- Done all of this while her Daddy has been out of town, leaving her Mommy and her MoMo to deal with the carnage.

Keep in mind, my house is covered in all manner of baby gates and child-proof plastic doorknobs. They are no match for this girl. Unless my memory decieves me, I just don't remember the boys being like this. I even looked back at the blog from 2008, and chuckled at how I thought the boys were so crazy because they ate M&Ms one morning before I woke up.

I feel I should somehow go back in time and warn the Mandy of 2008 what's in store for her.

Oh, How I Wish It Had Been a Sugar Glider

Sometimes I feel like I am living in some sort of sitcom.

Multi-ethnic children? Check.

Parents who are sometimes home at 2pm on a Tuesday? Check.

Ability to solve problems in 23 minutes? Sometimes.

Unusual occurances on a weekly basis that, looking over the course of a year, are highly unlikely to all happen to one family? Check.

Case in point: Friday morning started bright and early, with all four children up at 6:30am, and me kindly nudging Brandon to get out of bed with them so I could sleep for a few more minutes. In my mind, I was "kindly nudging". He may describe it as a "swift kick to the kneecaps", but he's probably being overly dramatic. One hour later, I join my family downstairs as they are eating breakfast to learn that their morning has already been an eventful one.

Apparently, at about 7am, a bat flew down the stairs, into the living room.

Let me say that again, a BAT flew DOWN the stairs at 7am.

From the UPSTAIRS, where all of our bedrooms are, where all of my sweet children were sleeping all night long, oblivious to any flying, nocturnal, potentially-rabies-carrying rodent-type animals that were possibly feasting on their flesh and transmitting fatal diseases to my BABIES.

Hot Brandon dealt with the bat situation how only Brandon would: trapped it in a tupperware* container, fed it fruit from the fridge, and released it into our backyard. (Note: I am not recieving any financial procedes from mentioning Tupperware on this blog. I'm pretty sure the Tupperware ladies would be appropriately horrified to learn that what once held leftover soup, quickly became a bat-procurement device in the hands of my bat-trapping husband. Do not try this at home.)

As my bleary-eyed, pre-coffee brain slowly processes this information, I begin to, appropriately, FREAK OUT. Google is searched. And searched again. And again. Pediatrician's office is called. County health department is called. State health department is called. Messages are left at an Infecious Disease doctor's office in the next town over, who knows more about rabies and bats than I do. It seems that the general recommendation is, when a bat is known to be in a room with a sleeping child, is for the child in question to recieve prophalaxis rabies vaccinations and immunoglobins. Since we know the bat was likely in the house overnight, and we don't know if he (or she) was in any (or all) of the bedrooms, we decided the safest course of action would be to vaccinate the whole family. All six of us.

As I have come to learn, one does not always know when one is bitten by a bat, especially if it happens while one is asleep. The bite can be almost invisible, and frankly, our children (especially Emerson, whom Houston mosquitos seem to LOVE) have their fair share of bumps, scratches, mosquito bites, etc. And apparently, a very small portion of the bat population carries rabies. RABIES, people. And if you get sick with RABIES, you die. Every time. And, that, my friends, was sufficient information to freak me out for the entire day on Friday and well into the night. The house was inspected, the upstairs torn apart, searching for bats and bat evidence (ie poop), and none was found.

I had more or less accepted my bat fate, and was planning to pursue Operation: Rabies Prophalaxis Vaccinations For All on Tuesday following the holiday weekend when the nurse from the Infectious Disease office called back at 5:45 Friday evening, telling me that the doctor would meet us at her office at 10 am Saturday morning.

Well. Okay then. Swim meets and soccer games and lunch with extended family went out the window, and the six of us piled in the van to spend three hours at the doctor's offfice. And all six of us getting multiple injections of rabies immunoglobin and round one of a four-part series of vaccinations? About as fun as it sounds.

The lesson in all of this boys and girls? If you wake up to find a bat flying around your house, around all of your precious sleeping children, and proceed to catch said bat in a tupperware container, do not release the bat into your backyard. Keep the bat, give it to animal control, so that if the animal doesn't happen to have rabies, you and your entire family will not have to endure multiple, highly expensive and painful shots, administered over a period of two weeks, and which may or may not be covered by insurance.

Tune in for next week's episode of Outnumbered when little Timmy gets stuck in the well and MacGyver rescues him with only a paperclip.

And Happy Memorial Day.

I'm Sorry

I had intended to post about my Dane this morning, but Blogger is being cranky and won't let me post pictures for the second day in a row.  Arrgg.  So my apologies in advance, this is just going to be a brain dump today.

Brandon is doing an activity called "30 Hour Famine" today with his youth group.  So last night the boys and I had a Slumber Party.  They got an early bath and then we all watched Toy Story in our pajamas with pillows and blankies and stuffed animals and Sprite and popcorn.  Okay, so a Slumber Party bears a striking resemblance to a Movie Party at our house, but Dane is much more excited about it when you call it a slumber party.  And since he has no idea what a slumber party actually is, I get to tell him whatever I want him to think that it is.  So far this is one of my favorite parts about being a parent:  making stuff up and telling your kids things you want them to think.  Today we have no groceries, and I'm debating on whether I would rather starve to death or take my 2 and 4 year old children to Wal Mart on a Saturday.  Starvation is looking pretty good right now.  I'll just tell the kids we're fasting because of 30-Hour Famine.  We'll call it a Hungry Party, and Dane will be all over it.

The month of May will be busy and fun.  So far on our calender?  A going away party, 2 bridal showers, a birthday party, 2 weddings, a rehearsal dinner, and a family reunion.  I'm already tired.

My children were up before 6 am this morning.  I was sleeping so peacefully when I hear a little 2 year old boy next to my bed say, "Mommy, I want to be a Ninja Turtle".  Which means "Mommy, I want my shirt off and I can't get it off!".  Some people have an alarm clock, I have Aidan, who doesn't like to wear clothes.  He also smelled mysteriously like blueberries.  When I did manage to drag myself out of bed, Dane reports to me that "Aidan got the berry soap".  Their bathtub soap right now is the squirty-foamy kind that's purple and smells like blueberries.  I guess Aidan wanted cleaner legs this morning, because he had smeared them all over himself by 6:15.  I sometimes hear rumors of children who wake up at 7:30 on Saturday mornings, go downstairs, put some cartoons of for themselves and grab a pop-tart out of the cabinet, while their parents snooze happily in their warm beds for another hour.  These are not my children.  My children have blueberry legs at the crack of dawn.

Every time I type the word 'blueberry' I am reminded of a somewhat disturbing scene in the movie Juno, which Brandon and I rented last weekend.

Does anyone know of a new Chic-Fil-A opening in the Houston area?  We are almost out of the free meal coupons Brandon earned last December when he spent the night in their parking lot before the Grand Opening.  The embarrassing part is, he got 52 coupons for free sandwich meals, and we are almost out of them.  We have eaten at Chic-Fil-A almost 52 times since last December.  It's a whole new level of cheap when you'll spend the night in a tent in a parking lot for 52 sandwich meals, people.

Our next door neighbor has a goat in their backyard.  Sometimes we get a note from our homeowner's association because they found weeds in our flower bed, and our next door neighbor has a goat.  I guess if we got a goat we wouldn't have any more weeds... 

My apologies to those of you who came to either see pictures of my children or who stumbled on this blog by accident and are looking for something insightful.  I woke up too early today for insightful.

Morning Funnies

I know I've mentioned this here before, but our boys routinely wake up before we do in the morning, and feel no need to include us in their morning activities. Here are a few things they have been doing in the wee hours of the morning lately:

--Dane changed Aidan's diaper the other day before we woke up. Normally, Aidan wakes up waddling around in about 4 pounds of sogginess before being changed. The other day, he was dry. "Dane tanged my diap-o" was the explanation we were given. And he did a pretty good job of it, I might add. The offending diaper made it's way into the trash can, and the new diaper was properly applied, with the front in the front, and the back in the back. Pretty impressive.

--We have a container of change that has been on our kitchen counter for a couple of weeks now. There are 3 or 4 rolls of coins, and some more loose change in the bottom. This morning, Brandon ventured downstairs to find every coin unwrapped and on the living room floor. The boys were very excited about finding money to play with and put in Dane's treasure box. They got in trouble for that one.

--Dane knows how to put a show on to watch TV in the mornings. This doesn't sound like much of a challenge, except when you consider it involves 2 remote controls, and finding the show he wants to watch on the TiVo list and playing it.

On another note, Aidan had his Valentines Day party at school yesterday. When I asked him what he did at his party, all I got was "I got candy." He has no idea what Valentines Day is (I'm not entirely sure either, come to think of it), he just know's there's candy involved.

I haven't been able to get spell check to work for the last few days. Sorry.

Sundays at our House

Sunday mornings at our house have been an adventure the past few weeks.

I should explain...a few weeks ago, we moved "Crazy Aidan" from his crib in his room to a twin bed in the Brother Room. He did great. Except at about 5:30 am (EVERY MORNING) when he feels it necessary to not just get up, but get up, jump on Dane's bed, and turn on the light. They procede to have super-fun brother time until they either wake up Mom and Dad, or Brandon's Ambien wears off. (usually about 7am).

Enter: The Sunday Morning Challenge.

Sunday mornings, Brandon leaves the house at about 6:30 am, and he tries to put a movie on for the boys and get them something for breakfast before he leaves. I have the task of getting both myself and the boys ready for church on time.

Perhaps not such a daunting task for mothers of less resourceful children.

2 weeks ago: Dane comes into my bathroom while I am attempting to finish doing the hair thing. "Mom, smell my breath". Interesting...Dane appears to have chocolate stuck in his teeth at 7:45 in the morning. Where are this child's parents? Oh, yeah. "Mom, me and Aidan ate all your cinnamints". I don't have any cinnamints. Could he be referring to the party size mint chocolate holiday M&Ms that I had just bought on Christmas clearance? The ones that were UNOPENED? My apologies to Dane and Aidan's Sunday school teachers.

1 week ago: I come downstairs to find Aidan yielding Brandon's samurai sword. The real one that made me the Coolest Girlfriend Ever when I gave it to Brandon a while back ago. The one that is kept 8 feet off the ground on top of the bookshelf upstairs. I look at Dane with the questioning look, and how does my acrobatic 4 year old respond? "Aidan got Daddy's sword down." My apologies to Dane and Aidan's Sunday school teachers.

Today: No chocolate was eaten. No swords were confiscated. No hair was fixed. Problem solved. My apologies to the people who had to look at my hair today.