Attack of the Toddlers

Today started out on such a positive note. Both babies were in fantastic moods when they woke up, and both seemed to be in the mood for cereal for breakfast. I got them dressed, then sat them on the couch and handed them their bowls of cereal (without milk) to eat. Normally I have them sit at the kitchen counter to eat while I work, but I needed the counter space, and with a galley kitchen set up there isn't a lot work room. I had a limited amount of time before I had to have dinner ready, so I was multi-tasking on the dishes while they ate. My goal was to get everything done early so that we could spend the rest of the day playing, and at the time it seemed like a good goal.

As I was working on dinner I occasionally looked up to observe them quietly eating next to each other, and feeding each other. Norah would hand Justin a bite, then he would feed one to her. It was so sweet so I wanted to quickly snap a few pictures of it before they stopped this angelic behavior. And stop they did. With no warning, they both decided it would be more fun to dump what was left in their bowls, on the couch, and then knock it off onto the floor. I quickly ran over and put a stop to it, but they had already managed to make quiet a mess. Out came the vacuum much to their delight!

As I was finishing up my stuff in the kitchen, I turned around to notice that they had decided to read a book or two, or twelve...... Make that all of them. Justin is almost always responsible for emptying out the book shelf, for two reasons. One, he likes to hide in the cupboard, and two, once it's empty he will dig through the books to find the one he wants to read, and sit quietly amidst the disaster, reading his book. The mess you see pictured here took them less than 2 minutes to create, ironically short compared to clean-up time.

After creating the mess in the living room, they moved to the space adjacent to the kitchen to go grocery shopping. Normally this is really fun to watch, but all they did was throw everything out of the cart. Once that project was completed they moved on, leaving the mess mostly pictured below in their wake.

This is pretty much how the day continued. Norah and Justin methodically tore the house apart, as I followed behind attempting to, as Jeff puts it, "mitigate the debris field" (which sounds like something you would hear on a weather report after a tornado). At lunch time they slowed down long enough to sit at the kitchen counter and eat their turkey sandwiches. It was an enjoyable 15 minutes as we all took a break. Needless to say it was all too short. Once they were done I let them down and started cleaning up after them. All I had to do was wash their plates, put mine in the dishwasher, and clean off the counter.

In that short amount of time the two of them managed to get into even more trouble. While I cleaned up in blissful ignorance, I suddenly heard Norah saying "Mommy, Mommy, my hand, it's dirty." I couldn't figure out why it was dirty but asked her to come to me, when she did I saw that both her hands were covered in dirt. Dirt. In the house. Where would they find dirt in the house? Then it hit me. The plant. The only plant that they can reach (with great effort). The plant that they had basically ignored up until now, which had enjoyed it's last day of anonymity. I ran into the front room to see that they had been "cooking" with the plant's dirt. They did this by using a spoon to lift the dirt out of the plant and onto the table, at which point they happily stirred it up, pushing it onto the floor.

I promptly cleaned Norah up, cleaned Justin up, cleaned up the table and brought out the vacuum (AGAIN!). I then put both of them in time out, and once they were allowed out, it was nap time. At that point I sat down on the couch and didn't move for the entirety of their nap. When Jeff returned home from work I recounted the days' events, which had him shaking his head with a "better you than me" smirk. After dinner and bath time we were both in the kitchen when I heard Norah say something to Justin about cooking. I flew once more into the front room to discover that they had removed more dirt to cook. Jeff helped me clean up, we had story time and then put our two budding chefs to bed.

Lessons learned from today:
1) Find more ways to occupy two very curious toddlers that don't include "cooking" with dirt indoors.
2) Remove temptation from their level even if they haven't noticed it yet.
3) The most frustrating and challenging days can make for great stories later on, you just have to get through them first.
4) Removing a plant's dirt is like stealing its food and you don't want to steal someone else's food do you?