A little out of control

It's been a busy few weeks. Ryan has been gone a lot. I've had the majority of the last 6 or 7 weekends alone, including a couple Sundays at church by myself - which is never any fun.  Actually, Sundays are never any fun when there are two of us trying to keep these crazy kids under control, let alone one.

I had said once upon a time that I was enjoying the twins being two years old.  Yeah, that lasted for about 2 weeks. Then they went through an insane amount of crying phase. Now they're going through an insane amount of crying phase topped with extreme stubbornness and resistance, combined with a mean streak.  Phew. It's amazing we go anywhere since every time we come/go/move/change locations/tell someone to do anything it's met with a screaming toddler who refuses to move and who kicks and hits me to death if I try to pick them up.  So there's a lot of kids getting left behind because my arms are too full to drag them, and I value my eyeballs too much (I've darn near had them scratched out more than once).  I frequently walk back to wherever they are to find concerned people looking for a responsible adult to claim the abandoned child. And I'm always a little perturbed that my threatening to leave them has yet to faze them and elicit the response I'm hoping for: that they'll actually care that I'm leaving them and just give in and follow me.

Plus the shenanigans continue. And are now multiplied by having lots of pee and poop around the house with all this potty training. Here's how my morning went the other day:

We were watching a friend's very chill, well-behaved little girl. I thought, hey, we have a little girl in the house, let's get out the play kitchen (which my kids love, we've just had to regulate more when they play with it since it's honestly just one of the messiest toys we have as we find the hundreds of pieces of plastic food in all corners of the house for weeks after every use...you know who you are oh you that gave us this toy :)  As I was getting out the pretend food, my box of birthday decorations fell off the shelf. I thought I'll come back to you in a minute. I think it should have been an omen.

I walk back out to find a large pool of pee on the floor. Two of the three boys are doing really well with the potty, but those darn little weenie shields hardly do the trick and I swear every time they sit down they push things up rather than helping them aim down in the bowl.  So we frequently have a child successfully sitting on a potty with no pee ever making it into the bowl.  So while I'm cleaning that up, I look up to find the boys have gleefully toppled all the stacks of laundry I'd just spent the last half hour folding. Grrr. While I'm re-folding the laundry, they get back into that box of birthday supplies I forgot to go back to and I find streamers and balloons and candles and banners and tablecloths and napkins and party favors all over the house.  Sigh. I get them all back into the living room, and the third child who isn't so skillful with the potty is leaving a trail of pee all down the hall on his way.  So as I'm cleaning that up, they get into the fridge and start throwing fruit all over the house. Unfortunately for me I had stocked up on fairly over-ripe peaches, nectarines and apricots the night before. It was a disaster. While I'm cleaning that up, I hear snickering from the bathroom. Never a good sign. I go in to find the twins have climbed up on the toilet and gotten the gigantic sized tub of vaseline and smeared it all over each other and the whole bathroom.  I shoo them out, clean the mess, and come out to find them having a tug-of-war over a sloshing bowl full of pee. (Apparently it's a huge privilege in our house to be the one to get to dump the pee, even when it's not yours.)  More cleanup.

During this time, Ryan calls me to tell me that there was a ruptured eyeball coming in that wouldn't be going into surgery until late that night - the one night in all two years we've been in Miami that I had actually bought tickets to a performance. We live right by the performing arts building which I think is beautiful and I've always wanted to go to so I'd gotten tickets to "Tap Dogs."  Hang up. More sighing. I'm going to have to find  a babysitter now. I snap out of it and realize I better quickly get the laundry put away before the kids realize it's sitting there again, and as I go in to put it in their drawer - the dresser collapses (another fine piece of Isom off-the-street furniture). Unable to figure out what in the world is wrong, I leave the laundry in the bedroom and walk out to scold Ashton who is standing by the front door with it open. I go shut and lock the door and realize he keeps trying to go back saying, "Au-dee, Au-dee," and I realize that the little girl I'm watching is out in the hallway. Sheesh. Now I'm missing someone else's child! (I swear I wasn't totally irresponsible - I had really seen her on my way to put away the laundry so it couldn't have been that long.) I herd everyone back in and start the task of trying to find a babysitter for the night (this took no less than 24 phone calls and about 47 text messages and I didn't have one until my neighbor got home at 7:01 for a performance we had to get to before 7:30 - I just ended up taking a friend with me, obviously). My kids are crying and yelling and running around the house so I can hardly hear over the phone. I finally give in: everyone sit in one place and just watch a dang movie while I catch up to all the mischief you've been making!!!   (And you're kidding me that it's not even noon yet??) Then the air conditioning man that's coming to fix my neighbor's AC calls to tell me he's coming so I need to go let him in.   Someone else calls to say they're stopping by in a while, my friend comes back to get her child, the missionaries show up, the AC man gets here.... and wow. Ryan get's home from his surgery at 12:30 in the morning.

That's what I've been up to.