One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Sometimes in reading over my entries, I feel like I'm looking at a very rosy version of my life. I tend to post pictures when we're all looking cute and happy and doing something fun. So here's a little of the behind-the-scenes look into our lives this week.

TUESDAY--Sierra's offenses are piling up too fast. The night before she "binked" Caleb's life savings from his elephant bank and added it to her piggy bank. In the morning when I wake up and enter the kitchen, I see that Sierra has been busy throwing a tea party, getting out the sugar and milk by herself and spilling them all over the table and kitchen floor. She denies having any idea who had the tea party or how the mess got there. After cleaning up the mess in the kitchen and losing two days of TV for lying, she sneaks all the play-doh up to her room, empties every container, and gets a considerable amount in the carpet. I decide we have to get out of the house, so I drive over to the elementary school to register Sierra for kindergarten.

WEDNESDAY--I have an appointment to have my fingerprinting done for my preschool job. I take the morning off work, drop both of the girls off at school, and drive 45 minutes to the fingerprinting location. I have checked very carefully to make sure I have all the paperwork and documents and arrive with time to spare. Once I get there, I look in my wallet and am shocked to see my driver's license is missing. After a minute of panic, I realize that I had needed it to register Sierra for kindergarten, and that I must have left it at home with all her school paperwork. The fingerprinting place will not let me reschedule my appointment that day, so I drive 45 minutes back to work with nothing accomplished. When I pick Madeline up at the end of school day, she looks terrible. She can't seem to fall asleep at school, and she is fighting a cold and desperately needs to nap. I take her home and try unsuccessfully to get her to sleep. When bedtime rolls around I hope she'll go straight to sleep, but she is so wired that she keeps crying and crying. After a couple hours in her crib, I try to calm her, rocking and holding her until midnight, and when I am so tired that I could barely stand it, I try giving her a bath. At this point, she goes totally hysterical, clutching her clothing so hard that I can barely undress her without hurting her. She writhes and screams in the bathtub, and then she won't let me dress her. She keeps pulling her PJ's off every time I get them on. I'm soaked in water from fighting her in the bath, so I hold her in the spare bed in her room with my wet clothes on for an hour until she finally falls asleep for the night.

THURSDAY--Sierra hops into my bed, and I tell her about my woes with Madeline. She's full of sympathy and good suggestions on how to handle Madeline when she's upset. I praise her mothering instincts and get up to start the day. While I'm brushing my teeth, I hear a loud thud upstairs. I rush up to Madeline's room and see her sprawled on her stomach like the chalk outline of a murder victim. Sierra's confidence in her baby caring abilities is such that she has decided to take Madeline out of her crib. She dropped her when she took Madeline over the bar. Nothing seems to be broken, so we go downstairs to the kitchen. The night before I set out a pot of pinto beans to soak in the sink. I love Mexican food, but my last two bean batches have have been failures. The time before last, Madeline pulled the lid off my pepper mill, and when I turned it upside down to grind the pepper, the whole jar of pepper spilled into the beans. On the last batch, my sister Michelle made me laugh so hard while I was talking on the phone to her that my bright blue spearmint gum fell into the beans. I fished out what I could as the gum dissolved, but the final product had a most unusual flavor. As I look at my pot of beans, I realize that The Bean Curse lives on. Before going to school, Caleb has thrown his uneaten bowl of shredded wheat into the sink, and of course it landed in my pot of beans. I wash them five times and hope for the best. I go upstairs to gather the laundry (Sierra had an accident), and discover Sierra has locked Caleb's door with no one inside to unlock it. (This is after I told her just yesterday that she was never allowed to lock doors!) We find the key and unlock the room, but I'm running out of consequences for her. She's already lost her piggy bank money, had the TV and computer taken away, and been sent to time out. I consider taking away her bedroom for the morning, but don't know what in the world she would do with her day, so I settle for a stern warning and start the wash. I will say though that the beans were some of the best ever--who knows, maybe shredded wheat is the secret ingredient!

Wouldn't you know it--as soon as I finished writing I went into Sierra's bathroom and saw a pile of her hair. She says she had tangles and cut them out. The fun never ends!