adventures in babysitting

Can you call it babysitting when it's your own kids you are watching? No. But, this week has proven to be quite the adventure on my own. Once again I have to mention how much I admire single parents and their ability to "do it all" (Athough being married to a cop is a lot like being a single parent. . . but that is a topic for another time).

Last Sunday, HF departed for Alabama to attend Cobra training. I still am not all that clear on what it was that he was doing, but he will post about it sometime after he gets back. While he was gone the following occurred:

I accidentally locked myself outside with the baby inside. We were so thorough in securing our home, that it is pretty much impossible to break in to our house. At least that's what I know now. Before, I spent much of the night lying awake listening to all the "break-in" noises. So hopefully I'll sleep much better now. To make a long story short, I had to call the cops to come and help get me in. And once he got here, it was done in probably 30 seconds. I also made a mental note that he had a mustache. It's part of my research. Cops and mustaches. Anyway, my neighbor across the street, who's daughter said , "My dad is really good at breaking into other people's houses", came over and he pushed our living room window in enough that he could wedge a stick in and he was trying to flip the bar out that was preventing the window from sliding. The cop pulled out a long bar from his trunk and stuck it in there and popped it out in no time.

We spent as much time outdoors as possible this week. One of the places I took the kids was on a trail that leads to a waterfall. I had the classic radio flyer wagon with the almost 20 month old inside. The kids were running along the trail exploring. On the way back down, Daisy, who is 7, asked if she could pull the baby down the hill in the wagon. I said sure. She began running down the hill with the wagon. Before I could tell her to stop, the wagon overcame her and went along down the hill without anyone holding onto it. On one side of the narrow trail is a river, on the other side trees. I began running as fast as I could after the runaway wagon, fearing the worst. The wagon was zig zagging all over the place, going towards the river, then suddenly turning the other direction toward the trees. Finally I caught up to it just as I believe it was going to fly through the air into the river. It was a very suspeseful and nerve wracking moments as a parent, but the baby was laughing and whooping the entire time and the kids had stopped somewhere behind us, bent over in laughter. I told them it was funny because nothing bad happened and I tried not to laugh as well.

Every morning I woke up to a kid sandwich. Except it wasn't very cute and snuggly. They were whining and fighting and wiggling and asking me what was for breakfast. And the sun wasn't even out yet.

The baby began saying words this week like, "NO!", "LET GO!", "GOWAY", "SHOE", "SOCK", "BIRD" and "DOG".

The dishwasher overflowed with suds all over the floor. The lights in the laundry room in the basement stopped working. I changed the lightbulb. Still not working. It's something I can't fix. One morning when we went outside, there were 6 little ant hills along our bottom step. Fun for the kids to look at, but I know those ants want something more than just living on our door step. There is a smell of a dead animal or rodent coming from the neighbor's apartment (he lives in NYC and only comes once or twice a year). I killed 2 of the neighbor's plants that I was watering while they were on vacation, and worked on this homelessness problem I discovered outside our kitchen window one morning:

I heard an awful sound and looked out the window and they were fighting. Then they all suddenly stopped and just chilled. They all have something wrong with them like a missing tail, a limp, or missing patches of hair. So why can't these things happen when HF is around??!!

And finally, we built a robot cookie jar. Except it has legos in it right now. The idea is from here. It was very easy and fast to make. We had all the materials on hand already except for the clear plastic pail. The kids love it. Turned out pretty cute I think.

Now we are rushing to clean up the house and welcome HF home! He will be here any moment and we are excited. We'll  celebrate his 32nd birthday that was on Thursday, and tomorrow he's got a man date to see the A-Team (rolls eyes).