The new cure for cranky

It is amazing that my kids seem to know when I am having an off day because they always come up with a way to make me laugh. Take now for instance. I am in the middle of trying to do a very boring research proposal for school involving an experiment I am supposed to conduct next week, but I am tired. And cranky. I think I may have gotten 2-3 hours of sleep last night and my boys did not trade up to take Mark Ingram in the draft and let my husband's team take him which I will never hear the end of so I am a little short with my fuse today. How do my kids respond to this? They bring their musical toys into the living room and start playing with them and then they begin dancing. It starts with them just standing their moving their bodies back and forth from one foot to the other with very exaggerated head swaying. Left. Right. Left. Right. After a couple of minutes of this I am almost smiling, but these kids are smart and know that it is not enough. They then move to the middle of the room and begin dancing with jerky almost violent looking motions with their arms up in the air all the while spinning circles. There is no way this can end well, but miraculously, they do not run into each other. When they notice one another they start laughing and then try upstaging the other. Stitch begins jumping while spinning and dancing and possible even convulsing while Trouble put his hands out to the side and starts flings them up to the left, down in the middle, and then up and to the right. He looks like a marionette that a child is playing with because he then tries to involve his legs. How can you not laugh watching these two. Thankfully my two goof balls have chased away mommy's sour mood and I can begin to really enjoy my day! 

Mrs. Butterworth’s massacre.

Trying to do homework with four children in the house is never easy. In order to get homework done you sometimes have to allow your children the opportunity to roam around the house unattended. This usually is not a problem when referring to Trouble, however. At least that was the case before he learned how to open the cabinets in the kitchen. 


Most of the cabinets that he can reach have little in them that could cause a problem. Baby bottles, plastic baby bowls, and sippy cups frequent the cabinets he can access. There is a cabinet that does have items in it that he should not be getting into with glass bowls and such, but it is child locked. The only other cabinet he can open has our bulk food items or items that I would hate to drop on my foot from the upper cabinets should my hand ever screw up and decide to let go. (This happened once with a Costco size bottle of Steak Sauce that bruised a bone on the top of my foot and made it so that I hobbled for more than a month.) There is nothing that Trouble could get into down there that could be dangerous or cause a mess. Or so I thought.

Last night as I was attempting to submit my homework assignment, Mack went into the kitchen. He then told me that I needed to come into the kitchen as well because Trouble was so sweet. I thought maybe he had curled up with his blanket on the floor and was asleep or snuggling with the cat. Nope. Not even close. Mack meant sweet in the literal sense as in he would taste sweet if I had decided to give him a try. Somehow my sweet little Trouble had managed to not only get into the cabinet (not a hard feat for him) and pull out the gigantic bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s Syrup, but he also took the lid off of the full bottle, and poured the syrup on the floor. Mind you these are half gallon size bottles of syrup and there was at least half of the bottle on the floor. He must have felt that my laminate floor was a tad on the boring side because he then proceeded to make syrup angels on the floor. Oh did I mention that while he was making said angels, he was lying face down in the syrup and licking it up?

Upon hearing the mommy police drawing closer to the scene of the crime, Trouble tried to make a getaway. Unfortunately for him, the syrup was rather slippery and it resulted in him swimming circles around the mess. Although the case is still under investigation, the mommy police are certain that they have obtained the proper suspect and he was punished accordingly with a bath.