Children...

My son did the unthinkable last night. He ran away. Okay, granted he's 2 and a half and he "ran away" in a shopping center sidewalk with me hot on his heels, but my two year old can book!

The part that scared me what that 6 feet to his right was a parking lot and people tear through it. I was mortified! To him, he was just running. I was envisioning his tiny head meeting a car bumper. I was yelling "stop" and by the time I caught up to him he was a good 25 yards from where we started. At one point I had to stop and kick my shoes off for fear of breaking my ankle. I finally caught him and did the whole, "You didn't listen to Mommy! That was bad! You stop running when Mommy tells you to stop..." yadda yadda yadda. My husband finally got to us and calmly said, "You're getting your first spanking" (gave him a swat on the butt through his diaper) and with a wagging finger said, "You listen to your mother when she tells you to stop." My son then realized he was in trouble and looked at me with his big blue eyes as if to say, "I thought we were having fun!" and began to wail. The whole thing was very heartbreaking for all of us.

Needless to say we didn't get ice cream and he went straight to bed after we got home. I cried the whole drive home (5 miles) and my son didn't say a word. At that point I wondered if I'd really gotten through to him or just made him mad. Then, I realized I didn't care if he was mad. I wanted him to be scared of the consequences of running away from us. Then, I thought about how many times I'd heard from my own parents, "We got mad because we just didn't want you to get hurt. We didn't do it to be mean." DAMN! Why did they always have to make sense, but I didn't listen or believe. I get it now. I totally get it.

Spring Cleaning

We have yet another house project! We found a small leak in our downstairs bathroom. Apparently, the toilet is actually possessed by the devil and hates us. We found the leak when we, innocently, walked into the dining room and squished through the puddle that had appeared. My dear husband (D-man) had been home for two days with a bad back and I thought, "d$@*, you could have at least thrown down a paper towel and stood on it to soak up the wet!" See, I thought he'd been a "man" and ignored something he spilled. He thought I had been in a hurry that morning heading to work and forgot I'd spilled something. HA-HA joke's on us! As you can see, the toilet is pitting us against each other!

Come to find out, the toilet (with which D-man has been fighting since we moved into the house) was leaking from the refill pipe (yes, I'm very technical) and the bathroom was semi-flooded at the back wall (there's a slight incline in there. Apparently, the potty is trying to escape back to it's home in hell) and ran into the dining room. Fortunately, it didn't make it to the china cabinet and warp the wood. However, it did try. It was headed there.

Luckily, we caught it in time and decided that if we were going to take the carpet up in the dining room (and who puts carpet in a dining room anyway???) that we should go ahead and do the foyer...if we're doing the foyer we might as well do the hallway... and since we're doing the hallway, we should probably do the living room, too. Then we went and priced it and decided to do it in two sections. Part 1: Dining room & hallway/foyer. Part 2: Living Room, but not until Fall or Winter.

We're going to be putting in either hardwoods or the Pergo wood/laminate flooring. So, we'll see. It most likely won't be completed this weekend. Knowing us, you should probably not make any Christmas plans with us either.... Wish us luck!