Randomness

I tried to post some pictures earlier from my phone, which got a reply from blogger that they were successful but they have not shown up. I am wondering if they ended up on someone else's blog, or else they are floating around in the general aether. It worries me that Mary may be lost somewhere in cyberspace, but I am not dwelling on it.

IKEA Canton opened this Wednesday. My friend Karla and I stopped by Tuesday night after yoga to see people who would camp out for 3 days for ugly chairs IN CANTON NO LESS! You can see pictures if you scroll down. The picture of the IKEA sign has Karla in front, if a bit blurry. The picture of me with two ladies and a strange green floral couch is actually (from left to right) the fourth person in line, the first person in line, and me, who was not in line at all and may wait until September sometime to wander in and see what all of the fuss was about. I really had no right being there. IKEA gave her the ugly green floral couch for being first in line. I have no comment about that.

Husband has been in Ghana all week. The girls have been awful without him and sob at night, calling "DADDY! DADDY". This trip wasn't very much fun over here. My Mom came and stayed most of the week and even with two of us they were nearly too stressful to handle. I was glad I had some help, because by Tuesday morning at 8 I was sobbing on the phone that I could not understand why my children were so difficult. It was generally a bad week for that. But I did get a lot of things done while my Mom was here, including planting the rest of my annual flowers. I searched all of the bushes, just in case my nemesis was stalking me since I knew he was in town, but I did not find him behind the hydrangeas in any case. He didn't call either, so I am thinking he is a REALLY good stalker. He's probably back home now.

There have been a couple of random child related happenings that are not cohesive in any way but should be recorded here.

The other day, Emma made it to the guest bathroom before I did. I have to lock all of the bathrooms, since Emma likes to irritate me by experimenting with water and whatever else she can find in there. I had neglected to lock his one and she was in and out before I could get to her. When I got in there, everything was perfectly in place, but it smelled. This wasn't a bathroom smell; it was a CLEANSER smell. So I asked Emma what she had done with a cleaner. She replied, "I cleaned the toilet". I looked in the toilet and it had evidence of bubbles from a cleaner in it. Then I looked under the sink and saw the Tilex sitting there. No harm done, but a bad precedence. I said to Emma, "Only Mommy cleans toilets." She immediately corrected me in the very specific way she has and said, "No you don't. Mama, the toilet was dirty and *I* had to clean it." Unfortunately, she was right.

Emma has taken to jumping everywhere. It began with a series of jumps to get across a street or a parking lot, which was painstaking but tolerable. Then it escalated to jumping to get off of things. Mostly harmless, but not a good thing to encourage. Finally it pinnacled to climbing up to greater heights to jump off just for the fun of it. This is bad. Sometimes it was a normal sort of jumping, such as off of a chair or a stool. More recently, we have gone to jumping off of the toilet when done using it. Then Emma decided that the bookcase in the nursery was climbable, therefore required jumping off of. She did this a couple of times and quickly learned that bookcase jumping was something best done when Mommy or Daddy were not in sight. Wednesday she ran upstairs after Mary's nap when Mary woke up. Immediately after that, there was a ceiling-shattering bang from the area where the bookcase lives. I walked upstairs calmly and asked Emma what happened. She denied everything, even direct questions (Note to self: old enough to lie). Mary, however, was happy to rat her out when I asked her what Emma had jumped off of. Note to Emma: welcome to siblinghood.