Before moving on to housework, a little blog.
Today's activity was have an indoor picnic in our pajamas. This is really just a secret way of getting them to bed twice as fast, but as long as it works! Daddy requested a picnic of pancakes so it was our Pancake Picnic in Pajamas Party (PPPP).
We've done this the other years too, but this was the first attempt at eating in the living room on my new cream carpet. I was really nervous about it, so I chose a huge thick, heavy old blanket to picnic on, and nixed the syrup. Kids had chocolate chip pancakes, sweet enough.
So everything was going fine, and that's when everything went wrong. I let my guard down.
(Behold, what comes next is super overreacting on Mummy and Daddy's parts and hardly worth the phrase 'everything went wrong'. But it involved my cream carpets, as I'm sure you've already guessed, and I *heart* my new carpet nearly as much as I *heart* the children who are determined to ruin it.)
I had bought a bottle of Red Grape Shloer for Lolly's birthday party tomorrow and told the girls it was special wine they were allowed to have a taste of. Well of course, they couldn't wait to try it, so I got out the special port glasses and poured both a small glass of 'wine'. Fifi loved it. Lolly didn't and asked for milk instead. I then told them to go out of the kitchen, get the picnic ready and I'd come through with pancakes shortly.
As we sat on our blanket, merrily watching Charlie Brown's Christmas eating pancakes, the girls began complaining of thirst. Lolly kept trying to go to the kitchen to help herself, so I ended up going through and bringing the port glasses through. Fifi's had only half her juice left and Lolly had only half her milk, so I thought, 'What harm can they do? They'll drink it right up before they could spill it.'
I gave the girls their glasses with the admission that if they spilled their drinks I would 'cry all over them'. (I'm a good mum, I know.) Several times I warned them to watch their drinks. Things were going fine. The girls sat quietly, eating and watching Charlie Brown buy a sad, pathetic little tree when suddenly, Fifi had one of her classic freak-out-go-crazy-excited moments and just literally exploded like a bomb, crossed legs and crossed arms just bursting out with a sudden cry of hysterical happiness and of course... she knocked over her red grape juice all over the blanket.
I screamed. I actually screamed.
Scott screamed. He sent Fifi to her room.
I freaked out, grabbed a nearby towel and started mopping it up hysterically off the blanket, like that would save the carpet or something. Then I realised I should lift the blanket to save the carpet just to discover... the blanket and the spill had been laid over our red throw rug.
So absolutely no damage whatsoever. Except the damage to Fifi's sensitive heart, of course. She was still in her room, sobbing, crying how sorry she was, totally devestated. So Mummy and Daddy had to go through, hug her, explain to her how important it is to be careful with drinks in the living room, etc etc etc. Fifi couldn't stop crying and saying, 'I'm so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so so [she must've said 'so' about thirty times] sorry!'
I think indoor picnics will be taken off next year's activity list. Because it very well could be me next year who ends up spilling the juice.
Hi Lori,
ReplyDeleteI've been faithfully reading your blog for years. I hope you don't think of me as a 'stalker', but I really enjoy them and some days, they've cheered me up, like this one today. I had been feeling a bit of a failure as a parent and read about the cream carpet post. It sounds so much like me! Some days, I'm trying to rub stains off the wall and salvage whatever nice things we have. And my kids have managed to damage or break the VERY THINGS I 'treasure' the most. I've lost my cool with them many a time. Thanks for being real :)
I don't believe in cream carpet. Especially in houses with little children. I say this because when we moved into our house, it was brand new, it was completely done in white and cream (read: cream carpet in nearly every room), and I had a five year old, a four year old, a two-an-one-half year old and I was eight months pregnant. We still have most of the carpet (16 years later), but it isn't exactly cream anymore. I've been working on figuring our what to do with it for years.
ReplyDeleteThrow rugs are good; especially if they are super-cheap and you can actually throw them out when something happens. At least if you get a carpet with some sort of fleck in it, it helps a bit with the child-sign (we did replace the family room carpet).
My husband always said that his ideal house would have all tile floors... built at a slight angle with a drain at the low end and a high pressure hose at the high end.