On any given day, there seems to be a distinct moment when all the good gets sucked out of it. Everything’s going along at a nice even clip, when suddenly, the earth opens up and ALL. HELL. BREAKS. LOOSE.
Take, for instance, this past Friday. We had had a great day. No meltdowns. No disasters. Just a nice, normal, uneventful day. The kids were seated for dinner. Mr. D was on his way home and it was just another hour or so until bedtime. I was in the home stretch. Then, along comes our handyman, Mario.
No relation, I assure you. 
Mario and a helper let themselves into the backyard to do a repair. No big deal, except it completely blew Scout’s mind. He started asking a million questions (or rather, the same question a million times) and jumping in and out of his chair to run to the back door to “check on the workers”.
Then, as if that wasn’t excitement enough, Scout spotted this on the lawn…
It’s the top to the (toy) fire extinguisher he received as part of a whole fire freighter ensemble for a birthday gift last weekend. See, this is what it looks like intact…
It squirts water, which is why it was quickly relegated OUTSIDE… and outside (and ignored) is where it remained all week. If I had know that it would be the lynch pin to a crazy bomb, I would have relegated it to the recycle bin…
Scout kept asking if I knew where the bottom part was and I kept saying, “No, I don’t. We’ll find it later. Just eat your dinner”. Unsatisfied, he pulled off his pants, shoes, and socks (?) and bolted for the backyard, half naked and sobbing, convinced that the men had taken his toy.
Somehow, I manged to pull “Chicken Little” back into the house. Mario followed behind with a bill for over $600 (!!!) and requested that I pay him in cash. “Small bills, if you have it.”
Uhhh, I barely had 50 cents and that I scrounged from the dryer.
He and I went back and forth on the issue for a while, but I finally convinced him to accept a check. Not a hard sell, since it was that or nothing. Literally.
So, I go in search of my checkbook. I find the cover, but there are no more checks inside. While I dug through the remaining five boxes left to unpack, Mario excused himself to wash his hands. I could hear Scout following after accusingly, “Did YOU take my fire extinguisher? Did you? Did you?”
I’m all, “Dude! Remember five days ago when I specifically asked you to pick up the toys from the backyard and you didn’t do it because you didn’t GIVE A SHIT? Yeah, can we please go back to that?”
Okay, who am I kidding? Of course, not.
I manage to locate the new checks. I pay Mario and show him out the front door. I go out to the backyard and find the bottom part of the extinguisher. It had just rolled off the deck, and if Scout had bothered to LOOK instead of freak out, he would have found it too. I put the toy back together, handed it to him, and save humanity as we know it. (You’re welcome.)
Well, you’ll never guess what I found abandoned at the bottom of a closet barely twenty minutes later?
And this is where it will remain, forgotten until the next time he’s supposed to be doing something else.
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This all sounds really familiar. I’ve been there, except without a Mario but some other chaotic situation. Kids have the attention span of a fly, but when they want something, they want it NOW.
.-= C @ Kid Things´s last blog ..A Shit-uation =-.
I commend you for not having your very own meltdown. I think I might have lost it a bit had everything you just listed happened at the same time.
.-= Amber´s last blog ..Stupid Stupid Stupid =-.
The threes will wear off in a couple of months…nobody ever tells anyone else that the threes are just so infinitely much worse than the twos. But it really does start getting more normal…or at least more recognizably crazy…after four. We had a similar situation with a magic wand and I relegated that thing to the recycling bin asap when it was left lying around…I did blame it on the fence repair guy even though he didn’t come in asking for $600 in twenties. =)