Just Another Day in Paradise

A sample from today’s events:

We met Casey for lunch down at our fancy mall and missed his fragile naptime window. I decided to try walking him around the mall in the stroller so he could sleep. Bad idea. He slept for about twenty minutes and woke up wailing in the men’s department at Nordstroms. We quickly got back to the car, where he started screeching “walk!” as he apparently didn’t want to get into his car seat. I promised him a cookie if he would get in right now (bad mommy tactic), but then had to recant when I realized that all I had in the diaper bag was pretzels. Really bad Mommy.

When we got home, I sat Kenny in the living room with a load of toys so that I could spend twenty minutes or so cleaning the kitchen. Within five minutes, my ears picked up howls of laughter, and I looks around the corner to find Dudley laying on the couch and Kenny on top of him, trying to get a “horsey ride!” I decided the kitchen was safer after all, and brought Kenny in there, only to see within minutes that he had completely emptied the tupperware shelves and had submerged the pieces neatly into Dudley’s water bowl.

After cleaning up all the tupperware, Kenny asked for some juice. I started to make his typical half water / half juice cocktail on ice when he started wailing “IIIIIIIIICE!” then laid down on the floor and started howling, beating his feet on the freezer door. After about fifteen minutes of tears and wails, I finally figured out that he wanted to put the ice in his cup by himself. oh… is that all? Well, why didn’t you say so?

Ah, but then there was the marathon of “huggies!” on the living room floor when Kenny climbed all over me and planted kisses on my face and head. Then we sat close together on the couch and read books and sang songs. We did his favorite puzzle over and over and ran in circles to his Baby Einstein CD. He even asked to go to the potty twice and did his business there. After dinner on the back patio, we played basketball and he practiced throwing the baseball as hard as he could. I think the fun definitely out-ranked the frustrations.

All in all, just another day in paradise.