Meet Maximus. NOTHING is safe from this boy. Nothing. Now, why I don't have everything locked and bolted down I don't know. Dumping out our jar of Q-tips seems to be a weekly thrill for this little guy. Perhaps I should move the jar, although something tells me he'd just climb to those heights or we'd never have clean ears.
The other evening Mason went to jog around the neighborhood and took Theodore and Woodrow with him. They usually play at the park that he circles and they bring bikes and scooters to ride along with. Max and I were cleaning up dinner dishes, and I wanted to get some work done, so I put him next to me at the desk watching Curious George while I worked away. Now Max does not get into TV too much, which is either wonderful or a failure on our part. I'm glad he's not always crying to watch shows, but at the same time I'd love to plug him in to PBS for 30 minutes.
Anyways, he eventually ran off (I thought to play trains in his room) but I was focused on what I was doing and of course...he was not playing trains. No. This little stinker had moved the stool in the kitchen to the counter with Theo's leftover birthday cake and had helped himself. When he came back in the room he was so proud of himself and even had to take me back to the scene of the crime to show me he'd used a fork too.
Then we come to our partners in crime. Theodore and Woodrow. The picture below with the funny hats was from a trip to Walmart. Woodrow always likes to take a walk through the toy area and these funny hats are a hoot. Now, our young budding artist Theo can never get enough art time. Ever. He almost always has marker on his face and certainly on his hands. 1st grade really cramps his art time and he's definitely bummed that PE is three times a week and they only have art once, and it's on Fridays...So, almost daily we have a meltdown about how we "NEVER let him do art, and EVERYTHING is boring." Every.day! Well, Mason and the kids had Monday off so we'd planned to go tour Argonne Laboratory Campus where Mason is working for the year. When we woke up we'd discovered our little Monet had been up and busy already.
Theodore had taken one of his tshirts that had a design on the front, turned it around and drew a picture on it. He drew the Argonne logo and then wrote the bases we'd been to on the corners of the shirt. When we asked him how he knew what the Argonne symbol looked like he said because Mason had shown it to him-this was at least a week or two ago. That he can remember, but turning off the bathroom light seems to be rocket science. So...off we went on our tour and a talking to about where he's allowed to do art unless getting prior permission.
Go figure it was 85 degrees on our outing, so by the time we got home mid-afternoon we were tired. Max went down for his nap and we told the other two to have quiet time in their room while we took a nap. They interpreted that to mean, "make the largest mess possible in our room". They cut paper, they drew with markers, they had watercolored tattoos up and down their arms (which splashed all over the bathroom and hallway walls and floors). But we, "never let them do art." SIGH.
Since this was the SAME day we'd just talked to Theo about where and when he can do his art projects I was a little bit upset by the mess. Fortunately Mason had snuck them out again somewhere (this may have been the same night as the cake incident) and said they would clean their room when they returned. This allowed me to survey the scene and cool my jets a bit before they came back...but alas, you do the crime, you do the time and they were sent to scrub the walls and bathroom-although I think Mason ended up helping out quite a bit.
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