My father was never one to teach me, he was one to stand back and let the scars of learning happen — Christopher Titus

I can’t seem to get up early during the week to save my life, a combination of not wanting to stick   everybody in daycare for more than a few hours at a time and dreading facing the toil of the day.   Redecorating the bedroom with wooden blinds has helped me achieve my goal!   Alana is down with my plan.   G, unfortunately, is not.   7:30 at the latest and she is up, even when she sleeps less than 8 hours.

Beckie has taken to making G breakfast and turning on a movie before she leaves for work, which has enabled my lethargy.   Its also given G free reign over the house for stretches each morning.   Sometimes this is quite funny – I wake to find stuffed animals organized by phylum, food stains arrayed in the style of Jackson Pollock, or G lording over toys long forgotten as her boredom leads her exploring into the darkest corners of her toyboxes.   Sometimes I wake to find her ready to burn the house down, sodomize the cat with a popsicle, or reboot the internet.

She is particularly fond of band-aids.   Sometimes she will paste 3 or 4 of them all over her legs.   Her loss ratio with band-aids is not good, and usually half a box is ruined in the process.   When I hear the clank clank clank of her rattling around in the medicine cabinet or climbing on the counters, I know she is up to no good.   I’ll roll over, tell her to go watch TV, and toss a pillow in her direction.   Then I hear thump thump thump thump thump thump as she sprints back to the other side of the house.

Yesterday the telltale noises intruded into my dreams, several times.   Once I cracked open an eye and saw her crawling across the bedroom floor and under a stool with a devilish smile on her face as she tried to sneak by me.     The band-aids were safe as she was busy playing with toothpaste.   I also have a tube of…ahem…steroid-based anti-inflammatory cream used to…ahem…ease some taintal-oriented saddle pain I was getting.   The tube is about an ounce, and looks like a container of kid-sized toothpastes.   Much of it was gone when I found it this morning, along with several white-streaked washcloths.   G asked me for a water bottle and said her mouth tasted funny.

I am confident in my methods of high-quality parenting.