Gabe and Charlie awake at 6:30.
Charlie becomes DBE (Dumper Boy Extroaordinaire).
I tried to make pumpkin cookies, but Charlie dumped a bunch of water into the mixing bowl. I thought maybe I could salvage it... I doubled the batch. Turned out I just made a double batch of bad cookies while Charlie raided the fridge and spilled leftover chicken, rice and teriyaki sauce.
While I cleaned this up, Charlie and Gabe ran around yelling at each other. I needed the cookies, though, because a friend was coming over for tea (Mormon tea without caffine, y'all). The cookies were a total bust, so I rounded up the boys and took them to the store to buy cookies. (Why didn't I do that in the first place?)
Finally, Charlie got to sleep, just in time for me to breathe before my friend showed up--but not in time for me to clean up the house.
Despite my "baby style*" house, we had a lovely tea where I had to stop myself at least three times from trying to clean up.
Charlie woke up yelling.
......I'm blocking the rest out.
I am having a hard time imagining myself with any extra energy let alone brain power right now. Yesterday wiped me out way before I was in bed. First of all, the day started about an hour too early. Lucy and Charlie will sleep in, But Gabe is up at the (butt) crack of dawn, and he enticed his little brother into getting up, too. It was as recent as last weekend that I thought we had turned a corner with Charlie. We had gone out to eat and he hadn't required any more effort than Gabe and Lucy did. No thrown food, no screaming. It was a golden moment. In my mind, a backlit glow of peace and happiness was all but there on everyone's shoulders and heads.
...Memories. ...A moment of silence to commemorate that evening, please....
Yep. Yesterday, I realized in the morning that I had agreed to get together with a friend at noon, and I had offered to bring refreshments. I scrapped a few more complicated ideas then settled on making pumpkin butterscotch cookies. I had already gotten the ingredients from the store a few weeks earlier, so it would be perfect. When I bake, I often double the batch just to minimize the mess making, opting instead to have cookies or cookie dough around for a few days or weeks. So, of course, I would double the batch.Well, Charlie was determined to help me out yesterday. He is so adept at getting up on the counter that, aside from dedicating yourself to keeping him off, there is really nothing to be done if he wants to be there. I was going to make cookies, and I couldn't do that AND keep him off the counter, so we were just going to have to deal with the fallout. Said fallout usually isn't too bad. He is usually content to be within arms reach of the mixer and the ingredients. Yesterday, though... he had different ideas. His fingers were in every inappropriate place, he was spitting out the ingredients that didn't agree with him, he was standing in only the most dangerous spots and to top it off, he gave me a single moment of respite while he filled a cup with water, then dumped it into the mixing bowl while my back was turned. I tried to dump out the water, but Charlie had added it at what seemed like the worst time possible, when I was still mixing in the pumpkin, vanilla, and eggs.
Despite the craziness, we did manage to (finally) get out some Halloween decorations. Lucy and Gabe really wanted to hang some spooky spiderwebs, and we got out the old ceramic skeletons. Not impressed? Well, they were spooky enough to keep our neighbor, Ava, from coming over.
Good times.
