Today was one of those days where, for some reason, we didn’t really end up spending any time outdoors. On the days that this happens I often look back in hindsight, and am amazed at my inability to stop banging my head against the brick wall that is parenting a 22-month old, and just shut her outside for an hour. Nothing calms the nerves like making nature take the brunt of my child’s need to destroy. I find it interesting that not only has this solution not sunk into my thick head yet, but it also managed to escape Steve’s consciousness that if we just put her in the hamster wheel that is our backyard, we wouldn’t have to both be on the brink of losing our collective minds.

The threshold of how many messes I can deal with in an afternoon is in the area of about 23. How do I know this? Because my precious, curious, expressive energizer-bunny of a child tests this threshold a minimum of twice a week. There are only so many times a sane person can clean up the lake created from an overturned cat water dish that has then been tracked from one end of the house to the other. Or how about how many times we as humans should be required to clean up yogurt that has been cellularly metamorphosized from a healthy food snack to a finger paint substitute? Not to mention the skill mastery that I have adopted in order to be able to effectively roll 25 feet of toilet paper back onto the roll. If we, as a human race, are given a finite number of times to say, scream, sigh or plead the word “no,” then I am afraid I am going to be fined a hefty sum for single-handedly depleting all reserves. And don’t even get me going on the fact that no matter how much I beg or plead, Stella refuses to stop picking her nose. [Picture it: we are standing at the checkout in Costco last weekend, and Stella is in the cart on the opposite side of the conveyor belt. I hear the bagger giggling and I look up to see Stella’s finger halfway to her brain. I beg. I plead. I do everything but leap across the lurching line of food and forcibly remove her index finger, and all she does in response is look at me as if to say “Make me.”]

Steve has spent the better part of this week fulfilling his civic duty at the county courthouse, and has been lucky enough to be in one of the courts that only runs until noon each day. You’d think that having two of us in the house all afternoon would actually make things easier. Nope. This afternoon, after managing to avoid partaking in any relevant energy-burning activities, we found that we had a rabid wolverine on our hands. Not only was she ready to eat us both alive, but she had somehow managed to turn us on each other. The divide and conquer strategy is not supposed to be put into play until she is at least 6 or 7. The book says so, dammit!

So, really what this all boils down to is that we have a kid who is enrolled in the G.A.T.E. program for the adorably cute yet cleverly deviant. This is SO going on your transcripts, Stella.