Adventures With Andrew

I was SO not prepared for toddler boyhood.

Teresa and Maddy had, and have, very different personalities, but even as toddlers, both of them were fairly tame. Sure, they were inquisitive, and occasionally got into something they shouldn't have (or more accurately, something *I* shouldn't have left out to tempt them!) but for the most part, they seemed to have some inherent reasonable boundaries. They knew what was and wasn't theirs to play with. They were much more interested in sitting down and playing with actual toys than in climbing or exploring or destroying things. I could leave them alone in the playroom for, say, 45 seconds so I could actually go pee, and trust that they'd be there when I got back. So, basically, I was spoiled.

Then came the holy terror known as Andrew. OK, he's not a terror really - he's an incredibly sweet and snuggly and adorable little guy - when he wants to be. But the rest of the time, he lives to get into trouble, and to try to give me a heart attack multiple times per day. I literally cannot take my eyes off him for a moment (without risking, say, $500 worth of damage to household goods, and/or an ER visit). Here are just a sampling of what he's done lately:


- in the time it took me to answer the door and sign for a UPS package, used a chair to climb up onto the breakfast bar and swipe the pen that I leave next to the phone for taking messages, and then drew squiggles all over the cover of my beloved green laptop

- found, in the corner of the pantry, an old crayon the girls had left out at some point, and ran around the house at lightening speed coloring, in magenta, all over every available surface (he seriously hit just about every wall in the entire downstairs); then guilt-tripped me by staring at me with a forlorn expression as I furiously scrubbed at his artwork with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser (thank God for those wonders of modern technology!!), pouting and saying, "No pretty? No pretty, mama?"

- over the past month or so, stole and hid a whole inventory of various and sundry items, including but not limited to: essential pieces from board games, the remote control for the guest room TV (which has still not been found), and one half of each pair of his sisters' shoes. He also stole my keys off the kitchen counter - we were about to walk out the door, and I put my keys down for a second to help Maddy go to the potty. When I came back, they were gone. It took me more than a week to find them. I had an extra car key, but not an extra house key, so for an entire week I had to leave the house unlocked (just the door from the garage into the house, but still!) so that I could get back in. The keys eventually turned up at the bottom of the laundry hamper 8 days later, which is also, I suppose, a sad commentary on how long it takes me to actually reach the bottom of the laundry hamper :-P

- opened the freezer, took out the enormous Costco-size box of popsicles, and laid them all out on the kitchen table to watch them melt

- often hits "reset" on my dishwasher after I've run it and left the kitchen, so that I come back not knowing at what point in the cycle the dishwasher was stopped, and thus having to waste detergent and water to re-run the entire thing

- similarly, likes to sneak into the laundry room after me and change the cycle on my washing machine. Recently, I put an almost-full load of my delicates in the machine and didn't run it, waiting to run upstairs in a bit and grab a few more articles to put in. Well, he decided to run it for me by pressing "start" twice, which repeats the last cycle - which in this case, of course, had been heavy-duty/hot for towels. So, by the time I realized this, my gentle/cold-wash items had been spinning on the harshest cycle in hot water for about 15 minutes

- ran into my bathroom, turned on the water in my soaking tub full-blast, then unloaded all the towels from the linen closet and tossed them into the tub full of water

- caused me to have to call Arizona Poison Control when he grabbed a bottle of cleaning fluid that our cleaning lady had set down on the table for a minute to answer her cell phone. He came to me seconds later, crying, with the cleaning fluid dripping from his face. I had no idea if he had sprayed it into his eyes, nose, or mouth. (Fortunately, they told me this was one of the safest cleaners to ingest, if one had to ingest cleaning solution, as it had mostly just surfactant detergents and not really any toxic chemicals)

- at every opportunity he finds, takes Teresa's digital camera and deletes all of the pictures on it

- takes all the DVDs out of the TV cabinet and switches the discs so that they're all in the wrong cases (and probably all scratched, too)

- grabs my cell phone, or the regular phone, if I turn my back for second (today I came out of the bathroom and found him sitting on the couch with my BlackBerry in the middle of an intense "conversation." He told me excitedly, "I talk Daddy! I talk Daddy!" And lo and behold, he was. I have yet to figure out how he managed to call Steve, who was NOT the last number dialed)

- created our great bathroom-locking dilemma. If I don't lock the child-proof device on the bathroom door, he goes in and either stuffs the toilet full of paper, overflows the sink, squirts soap all over himself, or puts toys into the toilet (oh yes, that has to be my favorite job of motherhood so far - reaching into the toilet water multiple times a day to rescue Dora from drowning). On the other hand, if we do lock the child-proof device, then Andrew can't get in, but neither can Maddy, who tends to wait until the last minute to go to the potty and then pees all over the floor outside the bathroom while waiting for Teresa or I to come open the door for her.


This is just a sampling of the great fun we're having lately, courtesy of Andrew, and it doesn't even include the "normal" toddler stuff like climbing on any available surface, leaping off furniture, and otherwise accumulating an impressive array of bruises all over himself.

But last night we had a new one. I was in the middle of making dinner and Steve had just come home from work. I already had side dishes cooking on the range, and some really yummy tilapia baking in the upper part of my double oven. (Can I just say again here how much I LOVE finally having a double oven!!) I decided to roast veggies in the bottom oven, so I preheated it to 400 degrees and went back to cutting up fruit for dessert. A few minutes later, I started to smell something funny. The fish had been smelling delicious, so I couldn't figure out what was causing this foul odor, which just got worse, and stronger. First I attributed it to pregnancy, which often makes you more sensitive to odors. But gradually, the smell got so bad, and so strong, that I started to worry. I looked around and couldn't figure out what it was - I checked the fish in the upper oven, I checked the range, and I hadn't put the veggies in the lower oven yet. I was distracted by the kids running around and the fact that dinner was already late, so I didn't think any more about it.

A few minutes later, the lower oven beeped that it was preheated, so I opened the oven door to put the veggies in. And this is what I found:



Yes, that is the molten remains of three of the kids' toys. The girls later told me that Andrew had been putting toys into the (cold) oven yesterday morning, and they kept taking them out. But, uh, hm, I guess they missed a few.

So, with all the recent worry about kids simply playing with made-in-China plastic toys, I'm sure what's *really* recommended for safety is melting them at 400 degrees and allowing the fumes emitted to permeate the entire house for 25 minutes.

Steve and I, as we rushed to open all the doors and windows and turn on the fans and try to air out the house of the probably toxic liquid plastic fumes, scraped the multicolored pools off the oven racks and the bottom of the oven and tried to figure out what they were in their past lives. I think they were animals from the Little People Zoo. Steve says no, the one on the far right was definitely some sort of Winnie the Pooh, from the distribution of the colors. He might be right, although he posited this after a couple of beers, so who knows.

And speaking of Steve, of course he blamed me for this! Oops, I must have missed the page in the Manual of Mothering where it instructs you that, while cooking a gourmet-quality four-course dinner and simultaneously caring for three children, you should be mindful to inspect the oven before preheating it, lest a gaggle of miniature zoo animals have taken up residence within.