Trouble: Part Deux

Guess who can get out of a five point harness?
Now what am I going to do?

I've spent a good amount of the past couple of weeks worrying about the decaying world that I am raising my children to live in, but I suppose I must most worry about getting T through to his second birthday first.
That kid is a magnet to electric sockets, broken glass, mean dogs with sharp teeth and most mischief in general. The thing is, he's also the most happy-go-lucky kid on earth. He knows that he's not supposed to be emptying the hand soap dispenser out all over the bathroom floor . . . but he also knows that if he sweetly sings "Old McDonald" at the top of his lungs and gives me one of his hundred watt grins when I catch him at it he'll get off easy.

Last weekend he and Seth knocked a lamp off the table during a wrestling match and broke the compact florescent bulb housed inside. After evacuating the house for twenty minutes, opening windows, turning on fans, carefully picking up pieces of glass and vacuuming then quickly throwing out the dust bag . . . we decided that it is not worth it for our family to use compact florescent bulbs right now. Sure, they'd save us money. Sure, they'd save the earth. However at this point I'm most concerned with saving my own sanity and with knowing my kids will make it out of childhood sans mercury poisoning.

Broken lightbulb evacuees eating their rations

It was hard to get upset with the boys over the broken lamp though. Seth said "Sorry mom. It was and accident," and I know that it was. Then T followed me around for the next 20 minutes saying "Sohhy Mommy. Sohhy. I sohhy Mom." And I forgot that there was anything else in the world aside from two chubby-cheeked boys with giant blue eyes and chocolate smeared around their mouths.

Certainly if I could forgive him for unrolling several entire rolls of toilet paper, wiping gobs of snot on every clean shirt (mine and his), sprinkling a half shaker of salt over an whole pan of scrambled eggs, climbing out of his five point harness on the freeway, grabbing a basket full of paper mache pumpkins off the shelf at the store and dumping them on the ground, turning over a bowl full of milk and Cheerios, dropping blocks over the half-wall onto the kids sitting on the couch below, running in the opposite direction of where he is supposed to be going every time I put him down on his two feet, marking all the eggs in the fridge with an X after I marked the two hard-boiled eggs for my lunch with an X, re-programming my ipod, pushing over a pile of freshly washed and folded laundry, and somehow managing to get cottage cheese in his ear . . . I can forgive a broken lightbulb.
At least he's happy.