How To Lose Your Mind...

Follow these easy steps!

1. Spend a second consecutive morning looking for, and attempting to capture, the fugitive chinchilla who mysteriously escaped his new cage. Violet was the only witness, and she's not talking. This will take at least two hours because every time you almost have him Violet will be sure to give an otherworldly, ear-drum popping shriek.
2. Have the four separate foods you so lovingly prepared for your child's breakfast all thrown onto the floor and/or in your face, uneaten.
3. Retrieve the black Sharpie that your child insisted on writing with (and you were too tired to fight about) after the writing quietly migrated from the coloring book to the cedar chest, then the couch, and then to said child's hands and stomach.
4. Now retrieve your cellular phone from the bottom of the bathtub that you just filled to wash off the aforementioned Sharpie-stained child. If this is a Rorschach blotch test, all I see is ANGER, Doc.
5. Disassemble cell phone and prop it in front of heater. Hope for the best.

Psychic Weather Forecast: Stormy with 95% Chance of HELL!

Remember sleep? I do, vaguely. I am so exhausted. Violet didn't go to sleep until well after 1 am, and popped back up before 8 am. That's not bad. However, I stayed up much later than she did in attempt to catch up on the cleaning that she didn't allow me to do during the day. I mean that; She did not allow me to do it.

She hasn't been in a playpen for several months now. She learned early on to pull up the Velcro bottom which left her basically sitting on the support bars and the sagging material, which was a dangerous head trauma incident waiting to happen. So that is out.

She still meets requirements to fit into her Fischer-Price bouncer, but good luck. It becomes a farcical situation quickly, evoking memories of a cartoon in which someone is trying like hell to get an agitated alley cat into a bathtub. Legs splayed out onto each side no matter which way you turn her, preventing her crazy legs from ever getting into the holes.

She just finished anointing the entire living room floor with her apple juice and water tonic. I'm praying to the Swiffer Gods for assistance. Hmmm, I wonder how much an American Maid visit actually costs...

I understand why nature makes kids so damn cute. It ensures their survival.