Chaos!

We typically use our blog to share our children's adorable moments and proud accomplishments, but lest we be accused of painting a too-rosy picture of family life, here's a story of the madness we sometimes have in our house.

One day each week, I watch all of the kids in our childcare swap (Juniper, Hazel, Luke, Violet, and Henry). On this particular day, Violet was not yet home from school, so I had Juniper and the three toddlers. In the brief moment it took me to go to the bathroom, Hazel managed to bite both Luke and Henry--hard. Both boys had nasty bites and were understandably very upset. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I suspect that Hazel didn't want to share her crayons. While I was comforting the boys and giving Hazel the standard lecture about not biting, I heard Juniper call out from the bathroom: "Maaaahhhm, I had an accident. I got a little poop on my underwear." (For the record, Juniper has been fully potty trained for almost two years. I can't remember the last time she had a poop accident.) I scooped up Hazel, unwilling to leave her alone with the boys, and went back to the bathroom. Juniper was sitting on the toilet, and there was in fact a little poop on her underwear, and also a little poop on the floor where her underwear had fallen. I was scurrying about, cleaning the floor, starting a load of hot wash laundry, stalling Juniper's requests for help wiping, when I heard Hazel vehemently yelling, "NO COLOR! NO COLOR! NO COLOR!" I dropped whatever I was doing and hurried back to the dining room, afraid she might be about to bite one of the boys again. Hazel, passionate lover of order and propriety, was aghast at the sight of Luke coloring a large blue scribble all over the dining room wall. "No more crayons," I announced. "We do not use crayons for biting. We do not use crayons for coloring on the wall. We use crayons for coloring on paper. No biting! No walls! All done crayons!" I left the three toddlers whimpering by the now crayonless table and finished my laundry, my cleaning, my wiping. Start to finish, all of this took less than five minutes. And five minutes later, we had all moved on to some other activity, the crayons and poop and biting forgotten in the wonderful amnesia of the very young. The nice thing for me about having a day's worth of chaos all packed into a few moments was that I didn't even have time to be frazzled or upset. I was basically working on reflex, and by the time I had a moment to think about what was happening, it was already done and fodder for a laugh and a good story.