My Little Escapees

Well....I knew it would probably happen eventually and it finally did. My children escaped aka went on the lam aka made a break for it!! This is how it all went down: on Saturday I got ready to get in the shower and get cleaned up for work. I have a routine. I go around the house and make sure all doors are locked and dead bolted shut, get the boys settled with a cartoon of their choice in the living room and hop in the shower. Fast forward 10-15 minutes and I get out of the shower, wrap a towel around me and check to make sure the boys are doing o.k. Normally I find them in the exact same positions I left them in. This day, however, I find the front door standing wide open, t.v. off and no little boys in sight. I spot their open Spongebob umbrella at the bottom of the driveway. My heart stops and for a second I don't know what to do. Finally, I run to the bedroom, throw on a robe and run outside in the pouring rain, no shoes, towel still on my head.

I almost ran directly into my neighbor who was headed up my front steps. She asked where my husband was and I told her that he's at work and I can't find my kids. She tells me that she found one of them in her backyard and the other playing in the drainage ditch. She took them over to another neighbor's house to get dried off. I ran across the street to that neighbor's house where I found both boys safe and sound and my neighbor on the phone with 911. I tried to make it light and said, "well I see you found my children!" My neighbor (in a rather demeaning voice) says, "THEY WERE PLAYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET!" Hmm...ok....I look down at my robe and bare feet thinking that it is pretty obvious what happened, right? Maybe some people are perfect mothers who never shower, feed their children all organic food and have children with perfect manners. I, on the other hand have children who burp loudly and then scream "Scuse me," who eat french fries and who break out of the house while mom's in the shower to play in the Damn rain!!! So....I gathered up my little escapees, thanked my neighbor and took my children home. Apparently the neighbor thought we should wait to go home until the police arrived....hmmm....I think not!!! As I walked in the door, the phone is ringing....it's Allen wanting to know why the neighbor called the 911 center we work in to report our children in need of care :) He explained it all to the responding officer and they didn't end up coming out after all....whew.

Once we made it safely inside the house, I again locked and dead bolted the front door and asked Nick to show me how he opened it. He immediately flipped the deadbolt open......wow.....I have no idea when he learned to do that. The next day, when I got ready to shower, I made sure lock all screen doors, deadbolt, regular lock and put child safety doorknob locks on all doors. I believe an escape attempt was made because I did find one deadbolt unlocked at some point during the day. When I took my shower, I locked the boys inside the master bedroom with me so I could watch them from the shower. They reminded me why I don't typically allow this. Max continuously tried to get in the shower with me (full clothed), unraveled rolls of toilet paper and shut off the DVD player which required me to get out of the shower over and over to restart the DVD. Sigh. We have been researching additional locks for the TOPS of all our doors and will hopefully be installing them in the next couple of days. Until then, hopefully there will be no more escapes and no more 911 calls!!

Hope, Love, Joy and Excitement!

I think it's safe to say that I finally have a child who can speak in sentences!!! I have just been unbelievably impressed at Nick's vocabulary and his ability to put 3-4 words together to make a sentence. He demonstrated this today when we decided to do some shopping at Gymboree. Daddy happened to find an adorable dinosaur costume in a size 5T that was on clearance for $13. I tried to put it back on the rack and Nick started crying "I want dinosaur!" Yup...he got to have the costume. However, I didn't expect him to INSIST on wearing it out of the store and all over the shopping center. It was a rather warm day, but every time I asked if he was ready to take off the costume, I got a stern "NO!!" Soo...Nick walked around in the very warm weather all night in his dino costumes. We got stared at and pointed and giggled at all night, but Nick enjoyed the attention and Allen and I agreed that you are damn well allowed to wear a dino costume any time of the year when you are 4 years old!! We managed to get it off of him for the car ride home, but the fight was on when we got home and got dressed for bed. Nick just flat out insisted on wearing that costume to bed, so we finally gave in and let him put it on. I tucked my little dinosaur into bed and snuck back into his room after he fell asleep to remove the costume so he wouldn't get too hot!

Nick amazed us yesterday when we went to pick up a few things at Target. Because he is normally pretty wild in stores, I made him sit in the shopping cart. This did not make him happy, but he dealt with it....for awhile anyway. Finally the cries of "I want down!" forced us to give him a chance and see if he could walk like a good boy. As soon as his feet hit the floor, he went tearing down the aisles across the store. Allen gave me an exasperated look and just kinda shrugged. I told him to go get Nick and put him back in the cart since he wasn't able to follow directions. Right as Allen started to run after him, Nick stopped. He had reached the candy counter which holds his absolute favorite treat....gummy dinosaurs. He picked up a dino, ran across the store where we waited, put his hand on the cart and said...."I be good!" And he was....at least as good as Nick can be, for the rest of the shopping trip. As a reward, Nick got to eat his dinosaur after we checked out.

This post has been written over the course of several weeks. Nick has continued to surprise and astound me almost every single day. He now has an infatuation with band-aids. Every night he tells me, "I want band-aid" and holds up his "hurt" finger. After I carefully applied to band aid tonight, Nick held up his bandaged finger and said, "I LIKE band-aid!" I felt my heart leap with joy at his ability to express even a very small and unimportant thought. I told him, "I LIKE your talking!!" At lunch today, he told me "I want macaroni-cheese." You'd better believe he got that $4 GFCF Amy's mac and no cheese just as soon as I could cook it. I giggled and got (just a little) upset when he fed his stuffed dinosaur the first bite. Luckily the dino was full after just one bite, but he sat at the table with Nick for the rest of the meal and his mouth was easily cleaned out.

Early in the evening, I was a little touchy with Nick. We were trying to get out of the house to go to the grocery store and he was stalling. He insisted on taking every one of his stuffed animals and tucking them into our bed for a nap. By the time we left the house, we had no less than 10 stuffed animals tucked under the covers as Nick told each one, "night, night" and "sleep." He insisted on bringing at least one stuffed animal with us..."I want green bunny!" I got even more irritated when he insisted on climbing into the backseat of the minivan and seat belting that darn bunny in. When he couldn't get the belt latched, he said, "I want help please!" As I leaned down and crammed myself into the backseat and buckled the stupid bunny in, I was grumbling to myself about the stupidity of this all and wondering if we would ever actually get out of the house. I finally got the bunny and Nick buckled in and climbed out of the van....sweating and irritated. Allen looked at me and said, "It's so great to see him pretending.....he's so much better than he used to be....." Again my heart leapt as I was reminded how much I had hoped and prayed and cried for Nick to do these "stupid" little things mere months ago. I have a son who speaks in sentences, insists on band-aids for an imagined boo-boo, pretends to feed stuffed animals and buckles them into their seats just like him. I am inching closer and closer to having a "normal" child. I'll love him no matter what....even if this is as far as he's come 20 years from now. In my heart though, I know there is hope, love, joy and most of all excitement for his future.