Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Lesson #20: Sippy Cups Multiply Faster Than Rabbits

My house is being overtaken by sippy cups. At any given moment I can walk into my living room and find no less than 3 of them strewn around the floor, in the toy bins, and (usually dripping) on the furniture. This is largely the fault of my almost 4-year old. He has a terrible habit of leaving his cup wherever he was playing and walking away. Every day I tell myself that he is only going to get ONE cup for the day and that if he wants a drink he's going to have to find his cup first. The problem with that is that when he wants a drink the cup is nowhere to be found. Literally. I send him to every room of the house looking for it, to no avail. Then I usually end up looking for it myself and can't find the thing either! After half an hour of looking for the freaking cup that appears to have fallen off the end of the earth, I inevitably give up and hand him a new cup. Then, without fail, about five minutes later I'll walk into the living room and suddenly there are six sippy cups laying all over the place. What the heck?! I don't understand this phenomenon any more than I understand why there are never any clean towels no matter how much laundry we do.

Speaking of sippy cups, I keep telling my husband that he has GOT to check the floor when he's cleaning up a meal. One side of our kitchen table is against the wall and the floor on the wall side is a repository for lost toys, dog hair, and dishes the baby has thrown that my husband "didn't see" (aka: didn't look for). Maybe it's a guy thing, but he seems to only be able to focus on one thing at any given time, and when cleaning up a meal that one thing is the baby himself. The booster seat tray might get wiped down, but the bib is never cleaned out and the cup is alllllways left wherever it fell when the kid chucked it off the side of the tray. The other day I found not one but TWO sippy cups of milk under the chair. Does he not look down at any point during the day or what? How does he miss TWO cups of milk under there? Last night I found one dangling haphazardly between the table and the wall. The worst, however, was when I was Swiffering (side note: LOVE the Swiffer Sweeper Vac so much I wanna marry IT) I made the appetizing discovery of a sippy cup of milk that had been under there for a while. I'm talking at least a week, maybe more. The milk inside was so far gone, I swore it was yogurt. *shudders* It was allllll kinds a nasty.

I'm thinking it would be nice if I could apply the sippy cup multiplication phenom to myself. Just got home with two cranky kids and no supper to speak of? No problem! I'll just multiply by two. A screaming baby that needs to be cleaned up after supper, a 3 year old with yet another poo in the pants, and a dog that's whining to go out? No problem! I'll just multiply myself by 3. Dishes to wash, laundry fold, floors to sweep, garbage to be taken out? No problem! I'll just multiply by four.

I'm pretty sure that until someone invents that technology I will forever be driving myself crazy as I clean stuff up and the three males in my house go right along behind me undoing everything I just did. On the bright side, at least I always have a cup, and from where I'm sitting, the glass is definitely half full.