*Remember, we’re still pretending that posting about Honor’s messes isn’t getting old.*

Yesterday after reading Looloo’s post I remembered that Honor had spilled clear nail polish on the bedroom carpet this weekend. This was entirely my fault, even though he knows he’s not supposed to be in there, because I left the polish on my night stand.

But very shortly after reading Loo’s post, just has I was getting my long awaited return phone call from Avon so I could chew them out for over charging me, I found that Honor, somehow, figured out how to get into the hall closet where my 500 bottles of fingernail polish are stored. I found a large puddle of metallic pink polish on the hallway carpet and this:

I didn’t bother to try to clean up the carpet, it needs to be ripped out anyway. And I worried that it wouldn’t be good to use fingernail polish remover so close to Honor’s eyes, so as much as I scrubbed in the bath tub, he still has a metallic pink nose. Serves him right I say.

Honor peed in the potty yesterday!!!

Yesterday morning Honor slept until noon. NOON! I kept checking on him, but, good Lord, you don’t wake a kid up! He didn’t take an afternoon nap, but it was an acceptable swap. While we waited for him to wake up (a.k.a. enjoyed our slime free peace and quite), Eden and I consumed large amounts of our new favorite snack, Nutella and graham crackers. This is her, “Can I have more?” face.

After he woke up and we had, you know, lunch, I went down to the basement and pulled the training potty out. It was a little dusty, so we took it out side and hosed it down. Honor was so very excited and had to sit on it that minute, so I pulled off all his clothes and the sitting began.

Potty training boys is a whole different thing. They’ve got whole different directional parts, so I had to teach him that he needs to point his pee pee down. He got it down pretty quick, he’d hop onto the toilet, point it down and then hop back up. Over and over and over again. He’s just missing one little detail: the peeing part.

We brought the potty inside and placed it in it’s rightful place in the bathroom. Eden and Honor spent quite a bit of time on their potties respectively; Honor on the training potty and Eden on the “flush” potty. As they sat there together, I reminded Honor that he needs to point his pee pee down and Eden said, “I’m pointing my pee pee down.” “Good job, Eden.”

It wasn’t until I found this:

that I realized what I’ve done. What was I thinking? I renewed his love for the toilet without even realizing it. Sometimes I astound myself with my lack of rational thought. How in the world would I think that he could spend any amount of time in the bathroom and NOT make a mess?

But here’s my big question: If it’s supposed to GO in the toilet, does it still make the toilet list?

Yesterday, just after she made this comment:

“Yesterday after reading this post I walked into my livingroom and saw one of my kids had also gotten out our letter stamp. I immedietaly thought of Honor and grabbed it and ran to find a spot they couldn’t find it again. I knew if I would have come back for it later, we would have had a repeat of your situation.”

Then just after that Honor came to me holding the damn stamp, ink cartridge removed, hands blue. AGAIN. He somehow, without the aid of a chair, got the cartridge off the counter. Trust me, this boy is not that tall.

BEWARE! there is something in the air… you are not safe!!! Hide your stamps and for good measure everything else that has ink.

I can’t believe that Honor will be two at the end of September. Didn’t he just turn one? It’s really amazing how much he’s changed. I remember lamenting that he’d never speak and now he says everything. He gets his little baby point across in two word sentences.

Asking for more chicken: “More bock, bock?”
More soup: “Some. Soup. Please?”

Everything he can’t find is “hide.”

Many times you will ask him a question and he will answer, “yeah” in the deepest voice you’ve ever heard a 1 year old speak in.

At any mention of a nap or bed time he runs to the kitchen yelling, “meiowk! meiowk!” (milk)

Every morning after he gets his sippy cup of juice he says to me with the most serious face, “Boots.” He’s never once said “Dora” it’s always “Boots”

Perhaps his favorite thing to talk about is bugs. He will talk forever about a “yuck bug” and is braver than me when it comes to “yuck bugs.” In the evenings, our front steps are swarmed with cockroaches (disgusting I know!) and Honor will scramble to step on every one saying, “step. yuck. bug. YUCK!” He will also talk about a fly like it was the coolest thing in the world.

He thinks that he can get out of trouble by coming up to me, holding out his arms and saying, “Hug, mommy? Hug.” And, ahem, it’s not like it’s ever worked. No.. not at all….

But I think that the best thing he has ever said is the thing that is sure to melt my heart every time, even if he looks like this:

is, “Nuggle Mommy. Nuggle mommy.”

And then I scoop him up and hold him very tight and for a short moment, I forget that he’s covered in goo and that the playroom carpet is now blue and that I’ve got to order a whole new thing of eyeshadow and that he broke the arm off my glasses and that he just can’t stay in his bed.

My sister always reminds me that I’ve always wanted a son just like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. Somehow, God, in his infinite wisdom, decided to fulfill my wish. That’s what I call a sense of humor.

So yesterday, while I was chatting with Joelene, Honor found our address stamp and got the ink cartridge out. He had ink everywhere, including the playroom carpet. This is after a good scrubbing.

His hands (and the carpet) are still blue. His lips, not so much. As always, he’s so proud of his destruction.

Today I’m following him around and not letting him out of my sight. I’m taking a risk right now because I can’t see the couch where he’s watching Dora. I’d better go…

Last night we threw a wedding shower for our friend Josh and his fiance Heather at the church. Josh has been our youth pastor for the last year and is now moving on to get married and then go to Bible school. He’s leaving town next week. The shower was just wrapping up when we heard Eden’s blood curdling scream from the next room. The kids had been playing in one of the classrooms and somehow Eden fell and busted up her nose on the Lego table.

Jim went to get her and as I saw him walk by with her I noticed the blood gushing out of her nose. We cleaned her up in the bathroom when we realized that it was cut pretty deep in two places. We decided to take her to the ER for stitches. My mom met us at the hospital to take Honor, because there’s NO way we could have contained him there (good LORD!) and the waiting game began.

As we went through the check in process, we had to endure the many judgmental questions about our waiting to immunize. Because, you know, we’re waiting because we hate our children and want to do the worst possible thing for them. Sometimes the medical field can’t understand that they do more harm than good at times. And it’s frustrating to have to defend your parenting choices to everyone in the hospital.

She had x-rays, and luckily it’s not broken. She kept saying that she wanted to go back to the picture room. I think it was because she got to ride around on the hospital bed. And luckily it wasn’t deep enough to need stitches, the doctor just glued the cuts together. Eden said that they were going to “blue her nose.” Probably the worst part of the night for her was when she got her first shot ever, a tetanus shot. Poor kid, it was awful! And it made me glad that she hadn’t had to endure any other shots before.

I think the worst part of the night for me was when we got home and crawled into bed and I started processing the night. Of course the “what ifs” began running through my head. It is the worst imaginable thing in the world to even think about your child dying. How would I continue if I lost one of them? It fills me with panic to even think about it. It makes me want to lock them up in a padded room in the house and never let them near anything dangerous. But I can’t. I’ve got to let them face all of life’s dangers, take all of life’s risks. All I can do to protect them is trust God that he will keep them safe. Letting them go is the hardest part of being a parent and it’s the most inevitable. And I have to say, it kind of sucks.

“What if Honor was twins?”

“Oh, good Lord… if Honor was twins it would have been a sign of the coming apocalypse.”

This is what I found yesterday in the kitchen. Just a small taste of Honor’s recent behavior. I’m grasping at straws here to try to figure out what to do with the kid. I think he just gets bored and then wanders around the house. He finds something and thinks, “this looks fun” and then pours/smears it all over the place.

I’m trying to figure out how to keep the kid interested in his toys. If anyone has any suggestions on how to deal with a kid like Honor, I’ll listen. I was trying to pick Jim’s brain last night because his is the closest brain I know to Honor’s brain. He finally said, “sweetie, I’m sorry… you’re just screwed.” Thanks babe. Thanks.

.Honor came up to me yesterday holding a wet diaper. At first I wondered how he got into the diaper pail but then he handed it to me and I realized it was warm. He managed to get his diaper off. I’m not sure how because he was fully clothed.

.Eden said to Jim the other day when he told her she couldn’t do something, “I’m so BAD at you.”

.When we were at Walmart the other night, Eden crawled in the bottom of the cart as the store employees looked down their noses at me and whispered about what a bad mom I am. Honor was sitting in the front where he played his favorite game: buckle the buckle and the yell, “bucko, bucko,” until I unhook it for him. Lather, rinse, repeat. Honor noticed that Eden wasn’t there as we started moving and he freaked out, “EDEEE, EDEEE!” He was so worried that I had left her behind. But as soon as I pointed out to him that she was coasting along in the bottom of the cart, her resumed his buckle game. “Bukco!!”

.Maybe it’s just a 3 year old thing, but Eden loves to give us the play by play on all her bodily activities. “Mom, I just tooted.” She’ll bypass the bathroom and come all the way outside to announce to us, “I have to go potty.” And just now she yelled at me from the bathroom, “MOM! I went pee and poop at the SAME TIME! It was SO funny.”

Because we’re gluttons for punishment, the walls of Honors crib didn’t go back up until last night. I admit, Jim’s got more determination that I do. He dealt with nap and bed times all weekend. I can’t even count the MANY, many times that Honor got up and got in trouble. Finally, by last night, Jim had had it. He stormed into the kids room, turned the light on and started to screw the crib back together.

Who would have known that the best punishment of all would be to make Honor sleep in a crib? He was heart broken, he just sat there and cried with the most pathetic look ever. Jim is still braver than I, he thinks that in a few days Honor will be able to sleep without the walls again. I, on the other hand, think that he can sleep in the crib for the rest of his life and I’m considering Joelene’s idea to cover the top with chicken wire.

And congratulations to my friend Jill who just found out that she’s pregnant with her third!