Out of the Mouths of Babes

It started as such a nice day. It wasn't raining, first off, so that was a very good thing. We got up, ate, did some schoolwork. . . the baby went down for her first nap . . . aaaaaannnnnnddd, I went upstairs to the playroom.

I had intended to get the children to pick up just a bit, and then send them outside so I could get in some well-deserved knitting time. Even though I got this done in my Knitting as a Spiritual Practice group:



















I hoped to get a lot more progress done on both -- I wanted to finish most of the leg of the Jaywalker and to get into the pattern on the green cable sweater (when is a "cable sweater" an "Aran sweater?" Does it have to be cream? From Ireland? Who knows?).

At any rate, when I went upstairs, and noticed just how much mess was up there, I started to get unhappy. When I noticed not one, not two, not even three but four rotten apple cores, strewn around the computer desk, I really started to lose it. The addition of some of my "special things" (believe you me, I have very few of these) taken out of the yarn room and played with was just sauce. So all of us then had to pick up together, not just a few things, but ev-er-y-thing.

Cue crying, yelling, fighting, accusations of slackage: "It's not fair! I'm doing it all and they're not doing anything!" My favorite was when Thing 2 shouted at Thing 1, "You're making me talk so much I can't get my breath!" I did my share of yelling, I'm sorry to say, and even intimated that if they were going to treat the room as a sty, we might as well put pigs in it.

Needless to say, it wasn't a great time. It got worse when a friend of theirs showed up to play while her parents, who are landscape installers, worked on our back yard. I had to tell her that they couldn't play until they were done, because by this time, all the stomping and yelling had woken up the baby, which is nearly a capital offense. Being kept away from their friend only heightened the already-high levels of distress.

Finally, after many tears, many fights, me thinking both that I was really tired of this and that maybe I'm just not cut out to, you know, rear children, and far too many rotten apples, it was near enough to "clean" to spring the kids.

They ran out like puppies from a cage. Another friend came over -- yahoo! Now there are four children, ages 4-6, romping through the house. The baby was awake, so it was just loud, not criminal. They started a long game complete with costumes and stuffed animals, and I was just sitting down to breathe when I hear one of my beloved darlings say screech, " "Hey!!! Do you want to play babies and evil Mommy?"