Technology, meet h2o

I'm blogging slooooowly from my iPad (so it'll be short, too! And no pictures!) because last week both out laptops got a bath. Joe blames Ethan, the person who actually poured the water on our devices, but I say Joe, who left an open water bottle FULL of water next to an open laptop that was playing music (baby magnet!) on the desk with a handy chair (for baby accessibility) might REALLY be to blame. But who knows. Now the MacBook is at the hospital, and it's not looking good. The hp won't even turn on, so it looks worse. It doesn't even get a trip to the technology hospital because it was on its way out anyway; it succumbed to second-hand splash in its old age. The best advice we heard for fixing a computer that got water dumped on it was "cover it in rice and leave it overnight; this will attract Asians who will come and fix it."

 The iPad, though, is still alive!  So now on to my story. Eli and Patrick found a tiny green caterpillar in our backyard, and they wanted to keep it to watch it turn into a butterfly. I suggested a container, they upped me one and said they could put it on the grass and put a container OVER it so the caterpillar would always have fresh food. Great! Two minutes later they were back inside looking for scissors; the caterpillar was so green and so tiny that as soon as they put it in the grass they lost it, and they would now cut down the grass to spy it more easily. I (wisely) counseled, "chances are you'll cut the caterpillar while you're cutting the grass." Eli looked me dead in the eye and declared, "chances are, WE NEED TO FIND IT." Back into the yard, scissors in hands, they never did relocate him but I had a good laugh!

sucker!

For a while we kept suckers around the house - the came in handy quite often, are easily portable, and are even less messy than popsicles. One night I was finishing the last chapter of a book, upstairs in my room to minimize disruption, and the kids asked if they could have a sucker. SURE! See? Told you they came in handy, now I can have 10 minutes to finish my book. Trouble was, I said sure to ONE, they thought "sure" meant ALL OF THEM. I came down to a freshly opened package of 50 suckers which now contained only 10. They didn't consume them all, there were a bunch of opened and once-licked suckers now stuck to the floor or left in the dirt, but which is worse - that you ate 40 suckers or that you wasted 40 suckers?  Eli and Patrick even each had 2 suckers in their mouths when I came down! They sure kept themselves busy in those 10 minutes. So I had a nice freak-out mom moment, everyone got suckers yanked straight from their mouths and thrown in the trash, got a whoop on their bums, got a high-volume talking-to, then got a time-out. I was SO MAD. When Patrick came out of time out he immediately went to the nook and got out paper and markers, which I thought he would use to write a mean note ("I hate you!") or draw a picture of our family and then rip it up (when he gets emotional he rips up pictures he's drawn). I was ready to continue my rant and tell him GOOD FOR YOU, when he brought me his picture. An apology, with me holding a sucker.

Translation: "I love you mom. I will obey, I am sorry that I ate too much suckers."

Talk about a sucker! I was still upset, because I was still right and they were still wrong and they STILL won't be getting a sucker from me any time soon, but it was a very sweet gesture that opened up the doors of communication when I was ready to slam them shut again. For that, thank you Patrick. I'll be keeping the note in my personal file :)