Socks in the Backyard

Any time you come to a point where you suddenly realize that your once glorious (in your opinion, which is all that matters, right?) vocabulary has been drastically reduced to a handful of words and phrases, it's a rather sad day. Today was that day for me. My average working vocabulary these days now seems to consists of: "No", "good girl", "thank you", "one", "two", "three", "can you please pick _____ up for Mommy?", and my personal favorite, "night-night". I realized this change fairly early this morning, which rather set the stage for the rest of the day. Loads of laundry were washed and folded, the kitchen table was unearthed, the kitchen (minus many dishes) was cleaned, and dinner was ready at 5 o'clock on the dot. However, those were not the significant events of the day. Those events were saved for moments which may make many of you laugh but, if you put yourself in my shoes, you will realize why it wasn't as... cute from the mom perspective.

As I said before, there were many eventful moments today. One of them was during Em's morning nap while I was folding laundry. Lani decided that she didn't like any socks or underwear to be put back into the laundry basket. I didn't really notice she kept taking them out until Em woke up and started to play this game as well. That was when I discovered the stock pile on Lani's blanket of a dozen socks and ALL my underwear. I put Lani outside, closed the security grate across our back door and thought that was the end of it. However, when I was double checking everything before taking it upstairs (stairs are hard these days, I make sure it's a necessary trip!), I realized that again, there were no socks or undies. That was when I saw them... brown ones, tan ones , white ones, and even large pink fuzzy ones (large pink and fuzzy ones are socks.. not underwear). Somehow all of them were scattered all over the BACKYARD. Now, this is the point where I started to use the lamaze 'deep, slow breathing' technique and tried to grasp how on Earth socks and underwear could just walk outside. I was standing there trying to figure this out when Em, in all her wonderful helpfulness, goes over to a pair of socks I'd been sitting on, and took them to the grate, where she shoved them through to her accomplice, where Lani took them, and then they both looked at me, beaming with pride at their joke! It's one thing to get pranked when you're older, but I just got punked by a 14-month old and an 8-month old puppy!!

Needless

to say, I was annoyed (at myself) and impressed at their sneakiness (I honestly had been watching them throughout my folding, honest!). That was only the first of the eventful moments, all of which left me exhausted by the time Todd came home, but at the same time, all of them were so HARD to not laugh at- those two can be so stinking cute! It's hard to discipline when you just want to laugh and congratulate for a job very well done.

For those needing their Em fix - Here's Em playing on the pillow I made for the kids' room... so much for it staying clean until getting into the room!