welcome to the jungle

I can't believe I actually allowed ...

The children to stand on chairs in the kitchen...

And eat spaghetti directly out of a pan.

Worse yet ...

I grabbed my camera ...

And took pictures ...

And posted them on my blog ...

For the whole great big world to see.

(Note: We'd already had our civilized family dinner at a table with napkins. This buffet that the children are indulging upon, represented the leftovers that were sitting on the counter.)


Whenever I wonder why the children have questionable manners, I must think back on this.

It's entirely my fault.

I take full responsibility.

No... WAIT.

It's YOUR fault.

If I wasn't a blogger and didn't see a photo opportunity before me, I'd never allow this kind of behavior to persist.

In unrelated news, since they were three-years-old, our girls have shared a double bed and for the past two years, there has been very little controversy surrounding their sleeping arrangement. Except, for when one of the kids wets the bed and drenches both the wetter and the co-sleeper.

Oh! That reminds me of a tale.

Have I ever relayed the story of my sister, Janet?

Janet is my older sister and she and I shared a double bed when I was younger. Because I had a propensity for bed wetting in my early days, my mother would put a rubber sheet on the bed in order to protect the mattress.

Unfortunately Janet, who was 12-years older than me and weighed a good 50 pounds more, created a divot on her side of the bed. So whenever I would have that vivid dream of waking up and walking to the bathroom in the middle of the night to go potty, I would soon be woken by my sister screaming because of the puddle that had drained beneath her.

Oh, how I remember her waking up in the middle of the night.

"Mommm!!!! Jenny did it AGAIN!"

(It's a miracle we're as close as we are.)

OK, back to the present!! Back to my daughters!!

Over the past several days, there have been many arguments about which side of the bed the girls will sleep on each night.

For whatever reason, they both want to sleep on the EXACT same side of the bed, which isn't possible for obvious reasons. Even though each night we alternate whose turn it is to sleep on the coveted side of the bed, and even though they are penalized one night for fighting when it isn't their turn, arguments still persist. So tonight, as the girls were in the throes of their nightly debate over who sleeps where, I decided that I'd had ENOUGH.

I told the girls that someone was going to go sleep in MY room and they would be moved back in to bed once they fell asleep. Then I told my daughters that I was thinking of a number between 1 and 10. Whoever got the closest to the number that I had in mind, got to stay in their bed, whoever got the farthest away had to move in to my bed.

The number I had in mind was four.

I asked Carolyn to go first and she looked at me for a moment before tentatively replying, "Ten."

Thinking for sure that she would lose because there was no number greater than six digits away from four ... I asked Elizabeth to go next.

Without hesitation she gleefully shouted, "FOURTEEN!"

And that is why she is now sleeping in my bed.

With a calculator under her pillow.