Oh, Hayden...

Hayden, I am writing this so someday when you call me to complain about your children, you'll know why I'm not-so-sympathetic and can't stop laughing.

Yesterday was Monday, and I tend to go a little crazy on Monday's. I make a list of everything I'm going to get done that day so I can feel like an accomplished, fulfilled person. I delight in checking things off my list. Clean the house, catch up and put away laundry, disinfect bathrooms, work out, quit eating everything in sight....etc. And I usually do pretty well.

By Wednesday (Thursday if it's a good week), I'm usually sitting on the couch with toys strewn about me, having given up hope of being super-mom, but sure that I'll do better the next week. And slowly the rest of the week falls apart until I naivley make another crazy Monday list and start the whole process again.

As I said, yesterday was Monday. I had cleaned the downstairs, including kitchen and bathroom, and then decided I'd turn on a movie for you while I exercised upstairs. You usually come up and check on me every few minutes, jabbering away. This particular time you only came up ONCE, and I was very excited to have accomplished one of my Monday goals in relative peace.

I came downstairs thinking you'd earned a special treat. Or not.

The first thing I noticed was that the couch had been colored on with a BIC pen. Not just in one area, but the WHOLE couch. My cloth couch. I also noticed wet spots in various areas, and then realized that you'd tried to scrub the ink off the couch...with the toilet scrubber.

This led me to the bathroom to put the scrubber away, which is when I saw that you'd drowned a few of your stuffed animals in the toilet, and then tried to flush. Repeatedly. I think in your almost-two-year-old mind the special Potty Elmo doll needed to go IN the potty. So I waded through the toilet water that was all over the floor, and retrieved the stuffed animals which went directly into the garbage.

Then I proceeded to scrub the bathroom I had JUST finished scrubbing.

I also tried to scrub the ink out of the couch, but it wasn't budging. I've used hair spray before on shirts and pants to get ink out, so I finally bit the bullet and pretty much covered our couch in a can of aeresol. The house still stinks like a salon, but it did loosen up the ink which I was then able to scrub out. We still definitely need to steam clean the couch this weekend to get the new hairspray stains out, but I figure that's better than ink.

Hayden was obviously sent here to help me keep my expectations of myself realistically low. The whole house didn't even come close to getting clean yesterday.

Oh well, I'll start over again on Monday, right?