I Hate Two Years Old!!!!

OKay I just have to vent before I go completely crazy.... This morning I woke up to a cute 2-year old in my face, with a very stinky diaper. I can handle that, it's happened many times. I splurged yesterday by buying some day-old donuts and saved them for todays' breakfast. Then I had a thought- "why am I rewarding the kids with donuts to start the day? I need to make them work for this..."

After that thought had each child pinky-swear/promise me that after breakfast they would be really good helpers and not complain about any of the many chores I would give them, OR ELSE they would have to eat oatmeal every morning for a week. That went well and I will tell about the results another time (I will probably do it again).

However, right now I am venting about 2 year olds and that particular story would be a tangent from my venting. So, at breakfast I thought it would be prudent to put Abigail in her high-chair (which I usually only use for time-out) and give her a bib. Lately she has been a tyrant at every meal time and throwing food and making more messes than I care to clean up. So, the high chair worked until she found that dunking her donuts in her chocolate milk was fun and spilled the entire cup onto the floor. Without the milk, she apparently found the donut to be too dry and ended up throwing it on the floor (which she does every meal). Now I had chocolate milk and sticky donut all over my floor. YUCK.

After breakfast the kids got dressed upstairs in my room (I keep all their clothes in my master closet to avoid them unloading all their drawers, which happened many times before I got smart). Once they were dressed I told Kaylie to lock the bathroom door and then I locked my bedroom door, so that the upstairs would be "safe". Then I had the kids start being my slaves, as they had promised to do. To make it more successful, I gave them some of their favorite jobs to do, starting with washing the windows and mirrors with glass cleaner. They were using a container of Windex that was nearly empty and hard to get any out, so I figured it would be safe to let them go upstairs with it without spraying it for them myself. (I hate going up and down the stairs when I am pregnant). I'll finish this part of the story later.

Meanwhile, I was doing the dishes and wiping the counters down. The kids came down, finished with their first jobs and then I told them they could mop the floor. That's right, I said "could";
they love to "mop" for me. I will have to post pictures later, but they had a blast dumping water on the floor and playing slip'n'slide. It was really cute. But, once again I am on a tangent. I will post that in another blog as well.

The girls went missing in action, which is never a good thing. I thought they were downstairs, where the only open door for them was the play room, so I didn't really worry about it. Kaylie and Carter were as happy as clams playing on the wet floor and I was on the phone with a friend. When I got off I went looking for the girls, only to find them up in my bathroom, covered in my make-up for the second time this week. Only this time Abigail found my water-proof mascara and put it all over her face. I was irate since I knew that both the door to my room and my bathroom had been locked last I checked. However, then I remembered that I sent Kaylie up to get laundry and she obviously forgot to lock it again. MAN!

So, now I had 2 little drag queens, a kitchen floor that now had puddles and puddles of water instead of chocolate milk, and 4 happy kids. I left the makeup on the girls for a while because I knew it would be a cry-fest and I didnt' feel like dealing with that yet. Kaylie and Carter cleaned up their mess on the floor with a few towels and my floor looked better than it had in a while. At one point I had 4 kids in panties rolling around in the water, it was pretty funny.

When the floor was dry, we made lunch and ate outside on the deck to keep our floor clean. Abigail of course threw most of her food on the floor and ended up in time-out in her high chair while we all ate without her. I was pretty wiped out after cleaning up lunch and we went upstairs for naptime. It was then that I had my biggest melt-down in a long time. I found that the kids had left the Windex accessible to the toddlers and Abigail had dumped the rest of it on her floor, mixing it with some of her feces and who knows what else. After I finished mopping that up I found that there was more feces on my bedroom floor (thank goodness for hardwood floors!). When I finished cleaning that up I went to find Abigail, only to find her on top of the kitchen counter eating Nathan's vitamins, that looked a lot like medicine. I was distraught and uptight. I really wonder sometimes if this child is trying to kill herself. I am constantly worried about what she puts in her mouth and can't seem to find enough ways to lock things up in order to keep her and Lily out. I cried and yelled, not knowing what else to do. I don't want my children to die from drinking Windex or eating medicine. How did both things happen within an hour of eachother this morning? AAAAAH! I went to sleep and had a few hours to recoup before it all started again this afternoon. But now I am too tired to vent anymore. I feel better just knowing that for some reason misery loves company. I know that I am not the only mother dealing with craziness like this, so please tell me this is normal and remind it that "this too shall pass".