The closest BoopityBoop ever came to being naughty was their decision to test us about the rule that food is to be eaten at the kitchen table. They both wanted to be able to wander around the house with a cookie or a fistful of veggie straws. I told them they couldn’t do that and they begged to differ. Boop kept trying to slide off the bench and run away with her food and I chased her, which she thought was the most fun game ever, until I caught her and pried the waffle out of her tight little fist. Then she got mad. I was unimpressed with her toddler anger. Boopity handled the rules differently: she stuffed her cheeks full of as much as she could hold and ran off. I admired her compromise.
The thing about toddlers is not that they’re naughty, its that they’re non stop. Our house isn’t all that big and I gated the stairs so they were contained on the main floor. That meant six rooms, including our bedroom. Two toddlers and six rooms. They almost never stopped moving. They split up and both have an uncanny knack for finding what you don’t want them to have. Jay had left a bag of popcorn on the end table next to his chair. It took them less than 2 second to find the bag, open it and dump half of it out on his recliner. I took the bag, clipped it shut and they helped me vacuum the chair up. I put the bag on the kitchen counter. They found it there.
One way to corral them was to read to them. They LOVE books! In fact, they refused to settle down for a nap until I gave them a book to read in their pack-n-plays.
On Saturday, they read their books, fell asleep and had a nice long nap. On Sunday, it didn’t quite work out. Boopity’s book featured over forty little windows that opened, three or four to a page. Those windows were no match for Boopity.
Meanwhile, Boop didn’t destroy her book because she was too busy taking her crib apart. She removed the fitted sheet from the fold up mattress, tossed it across the room and folded up the mattress. When I finally gave up on them ever sleeping, I went in to find her sitting on the bottom of the crib, leaning against the mesh side of the bed, nonchalantly reading her book with the mattress pulled up over her lap like a blanket.
So I gave up on the nap for Sunday.
We’d gotten a lot of snow earlier in the week. In fact, we had a little snow, a thaw, a freeze and then several inches of snow on top of glare ice. When I went to painting class, the roads were so slick with glare ice that it took me twice as long as normal to get there. I lost count of how many cars I saw in the ditch before I got half way there. Painting was fun, as always, but my eye hasn’t fully recovered from being sick a week ago.
You know how when you’re sick, nothing tastes right? And smells affect you differently from when you’re healthy? Well, being sick can affect your eye/brain connection as well. I like the way the painting I did looks but every stroke of the brush was a fight and I wasn’t able to push the canvas very far.
By the time I got home, Jay had cleared the driveway of snow and put a nice layer of grit down.
But it kept snowing all weekend. Jay cleared the drive at least two more times while the girls were here but at least the temps came up from the deep freeze. By Sunday, we had well over a foot of snow but it was up in the 20s and there was no wind, so it really was lovely outside!
I’d gotten snow pants, boots and mittens for the girls way back before Christmas and this weekend, I finally got a chance to use them! It took quite a while to wrestle them into their snow gear. Neither of them wanted to put on snow pants, boots, mittens and their coats. They are both experts at noodle-body so the process was long, hard and frequently hilarious but in the end, I prevailed! And when I finally opened the back door and tossed them out into the snow, they loved it!
Jay dug out the car they used to drive around the yard. Boopity made a beeline for it and pretended to drive through the snow. The snow in the backyard was armpit deep on them, so Boop followed me around, walking in my footprints like St. Wenceslas’ servant. We brought them out to the drive way and Jay showed them how he was spreading salt and grit. He let them throw handfuls of grit onto the drive. They liked that. Then we took them for a brief walk; down the driveway and across the sidewalk in front. I think they would have kept going all the way around the block but Jay and I got a little nervous, it was so slippery out there and they were really quick. We dragged them back up the driveway into the back yard. After a half hour in the snow, they were ready to go back inside.
All that snow made travel difficult so it took a few hours longer for Katie to get back to town. By the time she arrived to pick the girls up, I was ready to sleep for days.