Babysitting, Day 2:
Parents left yesterday afternoon for small 25th anniversary vacation. I've been left alone and charged with the management of the house for about 3 days. I anticipated little excitement. Situation is, I'll admit, not entirely dire. 15 minutes until bedtime for youngest, then another hour until next youngest goes down. And then, and then...I get to clean up! Cleaning up is not the same for a household of five children as it is in my own apartment in Berkeley. Cleaning up, in our appartment, implies an action with a definable beginning and end, at worst a discrete set of small actions stuck together. In this house, however, life can be interpreted as a continuous excercise in picking things up and putting things away, interrupted only by short durations of sleep. I have loaded and unloaded our (very large) dishwasher twice today. I have scraped dried food off of three pieces of furniture. I have unpacked and then put away the same toys and games at least four times...this, however, presents a problem: after Christmas, we now have more toys than we have bins to put them in. Result? Utter chaos in the playroom. Utter. Chaos. :::sigh::: At least there have not been any incidents on par with the play-doh incident of yesterday. I thought play-doh would be so *easy.* You just give it to the three year old, and he sits there and noodles around with it until he gets tired, then you lump everything back together and put it away. Heh, heh. I laugh at my own naivete. I have learned my lesson, oh, I have learned it well. I have learned that the caverns of a three year old's nasal passages are manifold and mysterious places. Suffice it to say that the only remedy for the situation involved half a box of tissues, and that Andrew will probably smell nothing but play-doh for the next few weeks. (I still can't figure out how he got it shoved up *that* far...) Okay, well it's time to go...it's gotta be someone's bedtime by now....