Every day carries in its breeze a whisper of curiosity and not a hint of monotony. Even when Winter begs on its gray, hazy, frost-laden knees for hours piled on hours of boredom and isolating gloom, my days come on the wings of something wild and completely chaotic. I'll give you a hint about the something… it's small and female.
I'm in the bathroom (that time when all hell always breaks lose) and I hear little voices outside the door. I gather from the few whispered words I can decipher that they are talking about the kitchen floor. Why would a couple of three-year-olds be discussing the kitchen floor? Or the more appropriate question: what did they do to the kitchen floor in thirty seconds?! I finish my business in a hurry and fling open the door without even pause to button my pants or wash my hands. There I find a naked bummed girl and her friend, Adam, whom I am babysitting, standing over a puddle spanning the area in front of the fridge. They are analyzing the phenomenon of the puddle's movement. It is rapidly migrating westward following the slope of the kitchen floor toward the cabinet on the west wall. I take care of the puddle with much haste, because heaven forbid it reach the cabinets and continue its motion into the cracks and crevices between the wall and cabinet. I find where her sopping pants have been discarded and re-clothe her knobby knees in dry ones.
We march forward into the day. We paint our way through a tall stack of paper, I bribe them to eat all of their lunch with the promise of a cookie reward, they race around the kitchen island yelling something about Sonic (the hedgehog), we watch some Curious George. After the show, I have them get out the bin of matchbox cars so I can spend some time in the kitchen. I'm preparing a dish for the Rotary Club holiday dinner tonight.
It doesn't take many minutes of peeling the skins from the sweet potatoes before I notice that a hush has descended over the living room where it used to be full of obnoxious car noises, just one minute ago. I'm good at dropping everything to quell whatever emergency bids me, because that is my reality and Auburn's reality. I leave those partially peeled sweet potatoes scattered over the kitchen counter and leap across the mess of cars to the other side of the living room where I find two backs turned to me. They're hovered over our ottoman, speaking quietly, the ring-leader giving instructions to her tamed lion.
"And we making the bed."
I hear this, "Making the bed" and it inexplicably alarms me, sends electricity down my spine and out my limbs, so I brace myself and bend over the two heads to see beyond their furiously working arms.
"No!!!" I explode. They drop what they are doing and step back, exposing the extent of the damage.
"Why did you do this?" I demand. I am so upset and she reads it.
"We were making our beds," she sheepishly explains, inching backwards away from me. They still hold the open markers and I pluck them from their hands then point my index finger sharply at the upholstered ottoman where most of their handiwork is boldly in display. Black and yellow lines and swirls mar the peach colored flowers. I'm pretty sure it's worse than the time last year when she drew with red lipstick on the couch.
"Do we draw on furniture? ...Ever??"
"No."
"Where do we draw?"
"On paper."
"Then why did you draw on the furniture?!?" I notice a few more marks up on the seat of the ottoman's matching armchair.
"We were making our beds." She restates this as if it should be completely obvious. Of course it is. I feel anger bubbling under my skin. I'm mad at her and the lemming who followed, I'm mad at the Relief Society sisters who gave these special markers to my kids at the Christmas Party last weekend, I'm mad that anyone makes markers for kids that are not water based, I'm mad that the stain remover is fragranced with a perfume so strong that it always send me reeling deep into a migraine. I'm just plain mad. It takes me the better part of a hour of scrubbing and spraying more and more and even more stain remover before the black lines have begun to fade to brown. The yellow lines though, they are refusing to budge. So now I'm looking at blobby lines on my furniture: brown and yellow. What do those two colors together make you think of?
While I am ferociously scrubbing, they are in her room. I think they are playing with cars again, because I hear the obnoxious sounds of motors and brakes, but really I don't care what they are playing with so long as they are confined to her room only. There isn't much that can go wrong in there, except for when Auburn gets her hands on the fish food and overfeeds Gerret's fighter fish named Lightening. She has done that a number of times, but the fish seems to endure it well (so far).
At last, I deem the stain removing "good enough for these folks" and go to check on the dizzying tornado that is my daughter. She and her side kick are in her room holding something long and stringy between their fingers. It looks like hair. In fact, on closer inspection I find that it is hair and thankfully not human. The poor doll only had well-kempt hair when she was still in her packaging; as soon as we liberated her, her hair became an unmanageable nest of blondness. It doesn't look better or worse with Auburn's lopsided trim and I'm worn down from the recent scrubbing, so I sing "Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be" in my head and barely utter a word to my tornado as I pluck the scissors from her hand and leave them gazing after me.
We occupy ourselves for the last hour of Adam's stay with us. I keep a careful eye on those two. We will be done with disasters for today, I have decided. I am happy to return Adam to his mom with all of his fingers, hair, and clothes in one piece. That leaves just Auburn and me with a pile of potatoes that need attention.
This is how I keep her busy while I make a casserole: I give her a small handful of flour on the other counter and she uses cookie cutters to emboss hearts, stars, and circles into the powder. She loves it when I let her do this so we continue along merrily absorbed in our own cuisine. Until I go to switch the laundry. I hate to say I stupidly leave her there, but I'm a glutton for mayhem. I switch out the laundry and she really gets to work with that flour.
Mountains of flour. Big, huge, tumbling piles of flour where one little mound used to stand. Three distinct mountains-- on the counter, on the chair she's standing on, and on the floor beneath her. And the runoff is everywhere else. Her front is completely white, as is the face of the cabinet and a wide circle around her on the floor.
This calls for a nice, long movie. Frozen. Her current favorite.
Not many minutes have gone by, the flour is cleaned up, and I hear giggling from the living room. I hold my breath and follow the sound of mirth. I find Gerret on the couch next to Auburn.
"Look at Auby! Frozen put her to sleep!"
"Look at Auby! Frozen put her to sleep!"
Sure enough, she is slouched into the fold of the couch, her shirt bunched around her ribcage, exposing her proud belly. Out cold.
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