I have been participating in the stories in hand class over at JessicaSprague.com . Just reading through the prompts for the class brought back so many memories. It's been a little overwhelming. So many stories left untold. So I feel like I'm catching up on a lot of recording. But before I forget my exact emotions for this week, I wanted to record this story.
Yesterday started out like any other day. I got up at 6 am and woke Caitlynn to get her ready for school. I was a little surprised to not find Hayley asleep on the couch because it has become her ritual over the last couple of weeks to wander from her bed at night to curl up with her blankie on the couch and go back to sleep. So I woke Caitlynn and told her to be extra quiet because Hayley was magically still asleep in her own bed. It didn't last, though, and Hayley was up within minutes of me waking Cait, despite the fact that Caitlynn was tiptoeing around and was literally using SWAT team stealth to move around the house in her morning routine. So I made breakfast and on with the daily tasks of getting Cait off to the bus stop and getting Hayley and i up and dressed for the day. Hayley fed-check. Hayley dressed-check. Hayley's hair combed and pulled back out of her face-check. Cold medicine administered-check. So, my turn to get ready. I shower at night, so I just had to straighten and fix my hair and get dressed. This took me approximately 8 minutes. I noticed that it was extraordinarily quiet in the living room where I had left Hayley to watch a movie while I got dressed. When I didn't find her on the couch, I immediately went to the office (the one room in the house that is completely off limits to the kids) and found Hayley in the midst of dumping containers full of glitter all over the floor and my office chair. This is just a glimpse of the catastrophe that was my office/studio.
Glitter literally everywhere that made it impossible to scoop up and salvage. So I sternly remove Hayley from the office and put her on the couch so I can clean up the mess. It takes me about 10 minutes to get everything vacuumed and for the most part glitter free. I go back into the living room to have a chat with Hayley about the incident and she is scribbling with a marker on the windows and back of our old couch in the sunroom. Mess #2. This time I put her in time out and started cleaning up that mess. After serving her obligatory 2 minutes of time out. She got up and skipped in her merry sing-song way down the hall and into her bedroom. Okay great, nothing she can tear up in there. SO I scrub the windows and sill to get the marker off. Thankfully it came out. I finish that task and here comes Hayley holding her hands out saying "it's icky! I poop!" She is pull-up-less (naked from the waist down) and has poop on her hands. My guess is that she went into her room so she could have some private time to potty and then decided to try and change herself instead of telling me like she usually does. Her pull up is on the bathroom floor and there is a bit of a mess where she tried to clean herself. Mess #3. I clean that one. And about this time Will gets home from being at work. So all of this happens before 11 am. What a morning!
Glitter literally everywhere that made it impossible to scoop up and salvage. So I sternly remove Hayley from the office and put her on the couch so I can clean up the mess. It takes me about 10 minutes to get everything vacuumed and for the most part glitter free. I go back into the living room to have a chat with Hayley about the incident and she is scribbling with a marker on the windows and back of our old couch in the sunroom. Mess #2. This time I put her in time out and started cleaning up that mess. After serving her obligatory 2 minutes of time out. She got up and skipped in her merry sing-song way down the hall and into her bedroom. Okay great, nothing she can tear up in there. SO I scrub the windows and sill to get the marker off. Thankfully it came out. I finish that task and here comes Hayley holding her hands out saying "it's icky! I poop!" She is pull-up-less (naked from the waist down) and has poop on her hands. My guess is that she went into her room so she could have some private time to potty and then decided to try and change herself instead of telling me like she usually does. Her pull up is on the bathroom floor and there is a bit of a mess where she tried to clean herself. Mess #3. I clean that one. And about this time Will gets home from being at work. So all of this happens before 11 am. What a morning! Mommy is completely worn out, broken down, and downright overwhelmed. I am feeling bad for being mad at Hayley. Feeling like a bad mommy for having this child who can cause so much destruction in just a matter of minutes. And feeling like a failure for having an overall sense of defeat before noon. My day did not improve much from that point either. I know someday I will look back at the pictures of our glitter-covered cat, Jack, who will probably still be sparkling 2 weeks from now, and laugh like a crazy person. But for now I am searching my memories trying to think of a time that I could possibly have caused my Mom or Grandma (who watched us while Mom worked when I was Hayley's age) similar grief so that in some way I would deserve the experience of having to clean it all up. The what goes around comes around theory. Nope. Can't think of any. I had my fair share of naughtiness I know, but I don't recall anything like this.
A day for the record book of my life. And a story I look forward to telling Hayley when she has her own child who makes a mess of similar or (with hope) greater magnitude than this one! Does that make me a bad person? Ha...I hope not. But I think this whole thing would have been slightly hilarious had it happened to someone else and NOT to me :-).
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