TMI

All boy! A frog we found in our backyard.
Cute man in his soccer uniform.Racing on the soccer field - He's actually pretty quick!

Brother love. Does it get any better than this??

Chef Tristan & Chef Pierce, taste testing at a local museum.

Chef Tristan

So sometimes you read people's blogs and you wonder. Why the heck are you sharing such personal information? Now I understand. Read on if you're so inclined but you have been warned.

The other day I took Pierce to Wal-Mart. Tristan goes to school three days a week now and I was giddy at the thought of going to the grocery store with only one child and on a weekday no less. I wandered up and down the aisles and took my sweet, sweet time checking the prices on every item and comparing products. It was glorious. And then it hit me. I had to go to the bathroom. I am not one of these people that gets a lot of warning. I had two cups of coffee and it was coming - fast. I darted for the bathroom in a beeline and for the first time in my life I wondered if I was actually going to have a public accident. I abandoned my sacred shopping cart and prayed that it would stay intact and in place until I got out. I unhitched Pierce and hauled him into the bathroom with me. It was SO GROSS. The toilet had overflowed and there was water and toilet paper everywhere. (And just for the record, it was not ME that overflowed the toilet!) I screamed "Don't touch ANYTHING!" and Pierce, thank God, obeyed. As we were walking out I thought now wouldn't that just be too much if I had happened to mad dash into the men's restroom instead of the women's? And sure enough. We had.

In other scatterbrained news - We decided to paint the half bath this weekend red. I mention the color because it's important. Red paint doesn't come out of things as easily as, say, beige paint. Or even yellow. Hindsight. We finished the bathroom and patted ourselves on the back, congratulating ourselves on picking out the perfect shade of red and only getting minimal amounts of paint on the trim. The kids woke up from their naps just in time and after a brief scare of finding Pierce at the top of the 6' ladder we thought we had escaped all incident. We shut the door and decided to clean the brushes later. Painting, after all, can be exhausting work. Then it got quiet. Too quiet. I realized I hadn't heard Pierce in about two whole minutes. I ran into the kitchen and screamed so loud that Pierce actually jumped, roller in hand. He had painted no fewer than four 12" tiles. In red. I guess it could have been much, much worse. He's actually quite accurate and he got hardly any in the grout and none on any of the furniture. We were able to clean most of the evidence but I'm pretty sure my heart stopped beating for an entire second.

Tristan has finally mastered the baby gate at the top of the stairs and he couldn't be more proud. He has been "secretly" mastering this technique for weeks and now he insists on opening and shutting the gate whenever necessary. It wouldn't be that big a deal except that sometimes at night he sneaks down the stairs halfway and watches whatever movie or TV show we have on. We thought briefly about changing our viewing habits and then decided that wouldn't be fun at all. Mark is an engineer and a good one to boot. He rigged up a motion detector system that beeps whenever someone goes up or down the stairs and voila, problem solved. The other night the alarm went off and we said, "Tristan....What do you need buddy?" He said, "Um, guys, um, could you please turn off the alarm so you don't know when I'm sneaking downstairs?" ;)

I think that's all for now :)