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| Full Disclosure- this paint incident is from a different day, but the result is the same! Paint-covered, messy child! |
Have you ever made plans that, for once, you didn’t want to
cancel, and then something happens to make you second-guess yourself? That was
my situation last evening. I was going out for a crazy girls night with a
friend. (It was actually just pedicures and a new ear piercing, but we’re moms
and we deserve to sound cool sometimes!) Anyway, I was looking forward to
getting out and going all the way to
Naples for a couple hours.
But when I told Cayden that big bro was going to watch him
and Ezra for a little while, his big brown eyes teared up. He would miss me
twenty-hundred and he didn’t want to be left all alone! Obviously, Ezra, Micah,
and Dara don’t count. I hesitated. Because I just had a feeling. Spider-Mom?
But then I dismissed it- they’d be fine. Cay is super dramatic- no idea where
he gets that from. I went over with Micah again the list of things they were
not allowed to do. This included ninja fights, sword fights, lightsaber fights,
lego fights, dinosaur fights… basically all the fights. I did not, however,
mention using the oven or painting, which came back to bite me in the
you-know-what.
Blissfully unaware of the chaos to occur, my friend and I
merrily headed off to our grown-up date. Everything was just peachy for almost
an hour. Almost. Then my phone started ringing. And not the phone call ring-
the FaceTime ring. That’s never a good sign. I pressed the button and was
confronted with a confusing sight- my back porch. At least, I thought it was my back porch. It
certainly held similarities. But it was red. And a mess. And red. Micah calmly
showed me the damage. The little boys had found paint and decided their big
playhouse on the porch needed an update. They proceeded to paint the entire
thing, followed by the patio furniture and cushions. In red paint. As if that
wasn’t horrific enough, they covered the row of windows lining the house in
chalk drawings of the family. Then scattered the painted patio cushions all
over so they wouldn’t touch the ‘hot lava’ of the chalk-covered floor stones. Oh,
and they hadn’t forgotten themselves in the painting process! I was literally
speechless. It looked like a scene from a horror movie- complete with happy
little chalk people/outlines.
I recovered enough to take a deep breath and begin my
motherly rant of, “You are in charge! You are supposed to be watching them!! Where
were you during all this???” Now let’s keep in mind that Micah, for all his almost
teenage-ness, is a wonderfully good kid. The kind of kid who tells on himself
regularly because of his tender conscious. So he totally deflated my righteous
anger bubble when he told me he had seen cornbread mix in the pantry. Knowing
it was my favorite, he had been in the kitchen totally focused on attempting to
make cornbread as a surprise for me when I returned home. How do you get mad
after that??
I returned home later that evening with much trepidation. I
almost got back into my friend’s car and insisted we head over to the brewery
for a drink. But I figured they’d had several hours to do their worst, I shouldn’t
give them any more time for destruction. I walked inside and there were happy
screams of ‘mommy’s home!’ No matter what they’ve done, that is my favorite
thing to hear when I’ve been away.
I cautiously looked the boys up and down. Perfectly clean.
Down to the pajamas put on correctly. (Cayden has a habit of putting his shirts
on backwards and his jammy pants on inside-out.) Micah proudly marched me out
to the porch for an inspection. To be fair, it was dark and I didn’t want to
look very closely, but it appeared that all the paint had been scrubbed off and
the windows sprayed down. We caught a lucky break that Ezra can only reach to
the middle drawer and grabbed the washable paint.
All in all, I was
really impressed with Micah. He cleaned the entire mess, lectured and scolded
the littles, successfully made delicious cornbread, bathed and dressed the
boys, and got them somewhat settled down. He did better than I do most days!
And, in true Micah fashion, he successfully negotiated for a
raise and bonus after noting my appreciation of his skills.
With Love,
Susanne
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