Foiled! (this time)

I decided to stop messing with the "put Lana in her pack 'n' play so that she can remove her clothing, climb out, and run amok" thing and put her in her crib. I wasn't sure how it would go with all three girls in the same room. There was a lot of carrying-on at first, but Maddie and Gwyn slept while Lana bounced around, then Lana must have fallen asleep shortly before they woke up. Thankfully, I was able to collect the other two girls without waking her. We'll see how tomorrow goes!

Two things I love to look at: sleeping children, and cute little toes!

A post dedicated to my Dad

I remember a lot of things my dad said when my brothers and sister and I were kids. Right now I'm remembering one particular phrase that he repeated alot: "We're not allowed to have anything nice." This was usually said matter-of-factly, and with some resignation.

The following sequence of photos is an illustration of my dad's expression, played out in my home. Though the rest of our home has fared rather well in the year-and-a-half we've lived here, I already dread the many hours of work that will have to go into repairing Everett's room before we can sell our house when the time comes.

This is where the doorstopper used to be

before Everett stood on it:

This is where Everett's closet door used to be:

This is what can happen when the paint starts to crack at a seam right over a little boy's bed:

This is what can happen when you put a child in time out with a tambourine in his hand:

This is what can happen when you leave three children playing with stuffed animals together while you are bathing your fourth child. (This was after we had replaced the blinds that had already been destroyed.):

I don't know if you can see all the little dirty fingerprints, but they are the evidence of the vent being removed repeatedly by little hands. (To see my post about one particular event, click here.)

And last but not least, I don't know how or when these happened:

Our Latest "Childproofing" Measures

For a time, we thought our house was pretty childproof... We are learning, of course, that there really is no such thing! Everett is, for the most part, a very obedient, helpful boy, but he has discovered some creative ways to make a lot of work for Cary. Once during a family picnic (summer of 2007), he came out of the bathroom and said to me: "I don't like Spiderman anymore." I assumed he was referring to his underwear, and that he had just changed into another pair.

Well, a few hours later I learned that my assumption was incorrect. Apparently he had decided that he no longer liked a spiderman toy, and had attempted to flush it down the toilet. This being the day of a family picnic, the bathroom had heavy usage, and by the time we discovered the problem... well, I guess that would be TMI. Cary spent a couple of hours that night taking everything apart and mopping things up, and the next day Everett helped retrieve spiderman from the pipe and replace the toilet.

A couple of months later, we discovered that the vent in Everett's room was not apparently not attached securely enough. I had let all four children play with stuffed animals in there for a few minutes while I vacuumed another bedroom. They removed the vent and proceeded to drop interesting objects into the ducts. That night Cary spent some time opening the ductwork and retrieving an interesting assortment of little treasures.

Our latest childproofing efforts have involved the kitchen chairs. For a while it was quite effective to lay the chairs down on the floor under the table, but the girls have recently discovered that they can still move the booster seats around and use them to reach all the neat stuff on the countertops. This is our most recent (temporary) solution:

Our Christmas Tree

This is our tree. Note the strategic placements of the ornaments--exactly one inch out of the reach of our three littlest helpers. All the kids helped to decorate the tree this year. I put hooks on the ornaments and handed them to the girls. They gave them to Everett, who put them as high as he could reach (grouped in categories). I moved a bunch of them up, or we would have had a single band of ornaments around the tree at about 4' from the floor. I took this picture on Christmas eve, and by this time it was looking fairly mangled. We all enjoyed it though, without me having to say "No" all the time!