Naptime wraps up around 4 pm, which is when I close up shop for work & things start to get crazy. It always seems like these last two hours of the day are the hardest, Harper wakes up with her second wind & I am just about cashed on energy.
I lay Harper down on the living room floor to change her diaper. She extends her go-go-gadget arms & reaches under the couch to pull out some sort of cat hair covered cracker that she immediately eats before I can stop her, then scissor kicks me in the chest & escapes without any pants on. I spend the next few minutes chasing her around, which is obviously just a game to her since she is much faster than me at this point. We end up in her teepee playing “peek-e-goo” with her stuffed animals & spend at least fifteen minutes getting her doll’s hairbrush tangled in my hair. I get her a bowl of grapes, a fresh water & we begin our afternoon routine of searching for missing alphabet puzzle pieces. (The W is her favorite. Or maybe it’s the M?) Once the puzzle is finally complete, she tosses it into the abyss of other toys in her toy basket & grabs us a pair of her plastic golf clubs that we will use to putt last year’s Easter eggs around the house. This is also when “
Harper, don’t hit mommy in the knee caps with your golf clubs” starts to play like a broken record.
We set up shop in the living room with crayons to do some coloring. She asks me to draw cats, balloons & pumpkins, approximately five hundred of each, we make paper hats, paper airplanes & sort all the crayons by color before she decides she is over it. She packs up her crayons (and hides a few in the couch cushions for safe keeping) while I head to the kitchen start cutting veggies for dinner. I can hear her chasing the cat around,”kiddy! sit!” as she kindly instructs Izzy to take a seat at the play table.
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Eventually she joins me in the kitchen, where she proceeds to unload the entire tupperware cupboard & scatters the contents throughout the entire first floor. I give her a wooden spoon & an oven mitt so she can “help mama?” She whips up some imaginary guacamole then decides she wants a banana. I hesitate, because I know she will probably only take one bite, but give her one anyway & within minutes, banana mush covers her hair & half the kitchen. She hates being messy, so now she has half the tub of baby wipes pulled out do a little damage control. I can’t help but laugh, “I got it!” she assures me.
“Oooh! My-Meow!!” Harper squeals & brings me the remote. This is toddler gibberish for “Nemo.” which means she is going to sit down & be entertained for a short seven minutes. I start to wonder how medical professionals can get away with writing off the idea of having a drink when you’re pregnant. They are unsure about what would be an acceptable amount so they just recommend against it all together. I may be pro-more-research on that topic. Haven’t they ever been pregnant before? A few sips of sanity during this little happy hour of toddler trickery is all I’m asking for. But I don’t. So I pour myself another glass of pineapple orange juice, which the cat (who now has a Mickey sticker on her back) promptly tips over & spills everywhere.
I half-assedly clean that up & get back to cutting veggies when I get rammed in the back of my ankles with a toy shopping cart. My knees buckle & slam into the kitchen cabinets, but that’s ok, I’m just thankful it didn’t cause me to cut off my index finger. Finally!! I hear Brandon unlocking the garage door, “daddy’s home!!” I yell to Harper & she runs to the door. Brandon is happy to see that we are both still alive, tosses me a bag of peanut m&m’s & scoops up the toddler.
Time to tag team this biz.