What I Did Over Summer Vacation

(or, Why I can’t wait for the kids to go back to school)

  I will preface this post by saying that I used to be a really light sleeper.  The least little noise would have me awake for hours.  Now I can apparently sleep through a nuclear holocaust.  I don’t know if it is my age, my medications, or just pure fatigue from having 4 kids…Jason thinks the kids know what they are doing and go into Ninja mode when they see I am still asleep.

   I think I gave birth to Dennis the Menace, or maybe Phineas and Ferb.  (I even have a Candace to go along with those two!)  Yesterday morning I awoke to my kitchen with food all over the floor, and the freezer door wide open.  Odd, since we just installed a new, higher baby gate.  Given the fog that I generally wake up in, I just cleaned up the mess and fed the boys.  I observed later how they got in…(they thought I wasn’t paying attention.  Either that, or they just don’t care.) 

   Jake got a small stool from the garage, along with a couple of towels from the laundry pile.  He threw the towels over the gate and set the stool in front.  Then he got Grady and stood him on the stool and “helped” him over the gate, where he landed on the towels.  Grady then got one of the chairs and pushed it so that it was facing the gate.  Jake could now easily climb in and out of the kitchen.

I don’t know what shocks me more – Jake using Grady as his accomplice, or Jake being the mastermind (he’s supposed to be “mentally challenged”, right?) 

    Later that morning, I had to put them in the tub.  I went back to my room to get some laundry together and get dressed, and when I returned there was 2 inches of water on the bathroom floor.  They had decided to stuff half a roll of toilet paper in the toilet, and flush it.  When the toilet wouldn’t eat all the paper, they kept trying…at least they apologized profusely for that  stunt.

  As I was cleaning up that mess, and then trying to get syrup off the living room floor (don’t ask) They once again got into the kitchen and into the locked pantry and brought a snack into the living room….

  It used to be a bag of Andes candies mint chocolate chips I had used to make fudge awhile back.  Now it was a Mo-Mo gravel pit/feed trough.

   All of that – before noon.  And all of this really isn’t out of the ordinary.  A couple of weeks ago my psychotherapist remarked that she felt sorry for me, and she didn’t know how I did it.  That is when you know things are bad – your shrink feels sorry for you.

   Those of you that know me well know that we have tried many forms of discipline without success.  Time out, spankings, reward systems, taking away favorite toys, verbal reasoning, threats….you name it.  My new trick is redirection.  When the boys get to be too much and I can’t handle it anymore, I put them somewhere they (usually) can only get into a minimum amount of trouble…..

  I bet I have the cleanest kids boys in town!