More Housekeeping Practice (As If I Wanted It)

Quite frankly, I should be past getting surprised by these things.

After all, I have seen three human tornadoes pass through toddlerhood already, and K has shown no signs of being any different from his creatively destructive siblings. So how is it that I can still be amazed by the amount of destruction one small tot can do in a very short space of time?

Yesterday I decided to tackle my first National Weight Registry packet. When you join the registry, you agree to fill out questionnaires on a yearly basis about your eating habits and exercise and stress and so forth. That's the whole point, after all. But still, when my first packet arrived, I was a bit overwhelmed. Five different stapled questionnaires, plus one of those scantron fill-it-out-with-a-no.2-pencil things. I felt like I was back in school and it was time for midterms! Anyway, since I couldn't get to the gym (again) yesterday, and B was still snoozing away, I decided to get it all completed soon after the older kids left for school. I left K to entertain himself (he was happily playing with toys in the girls' room) and briskly set to work. After I finished the first questionnaire, I figured I would get up and check on K. To my dismay, I found him pulling apart the contents of the baby bag. Diapers were strewn everywhere, and he had also started emptying the pockets so my personal things (like tampons) were scattered all over the hallway too. I put the bag back together, laughed a little about K forcing me to declutter the bag, and went back to work on the surveys.

Unfortunately, after that I stayed so focused on the surveys that I didn't get up to check on K for another 30 minutes. In this case I found that he had gotten into the fridge, dug out a bag of apples, and had decided to taste each one. I found a trail of once-bitten apples from the kitchen to the girls' room. In the doorway of the bedroom I found the mostly empty bag of apples and groaned in despair. At first I thought maybe a few apples had survived the nibbling, but alas, each and every apple had at least one mouthful gouged out.

This time I did not laugh as much. There may have been some imitation swearing involved.

But being the experienced mom that I am, I gathered up all the apples, put them out of reach, and resigned myself to finding some kind of apple dessert I could use them for. Then I blocked K out of the kitchen as much as humanly possible and went back to the pesky surveys. (I was only about halfway done.)

I hurried through the rest and by the time I had nearly finished, B had finally decided to grace the world with her presence. That reminded me that I had not heard from K in quite some time. I hurried into the hallway only to wade into drifts of diaper wipes.

What the heck????

K had gotten back into the baby bag again and had pulled out every wipe from two packages of baby wipes. They were everywhere. It looked like he had fun with them at least. Resignedly, I had plopped to the ground to try and scoop up the mess, when B proceeded to calmly tell me that K had gotten into the cheese. "The yellow cheese," she informed me. Meaning our two pound bag of finely shredded cheddar cheese. I was just leaping up to save our two weeks' supply of cheese when B added that it was in her bedroom.

Oh no.

The entire bag of cheese had been scattered all over the girls' room. An exasperating situation all by itself, but it was made infinitely worse because the girls have not been cleaning their room very well lately. So the cheese dotted toys, books, clothes, shoes, trash, clutter of every hue and stripe.

Then I really wanted to scream. Worse, filling out the Registry's surveys had taken me most of the morning and I had very little time left to tackle the stuff that had to be done before heading into my crazy-busy afternoon & evening. No time to clean up behind the cheese monster.

K 4, Mommy 0.