The Weekend of the Dropsies

Yesterday started off innocently enough.  We were expecting a visit from Nana, PopPop and Aunt Jen.  We began with a trip to the grocery store:  it was me, "She Who Hates Grocery Stores With the Fire of a Thousand Suns", and her little sister "She Who Hates Riding in Carts With Her Big Sister More Than Her Big Sister Hates Grocery Stores."  It had the makings of a lovely mommy/daughters outing.  Then we arrived at Safeway only to find out that the TV Carts were broken.  Not to be deterred, I shoved two children complete with coats into a space made for 1.5 children.  About every 30 seconds I heard "She's biting me again!!!" and looked down to see Sharklotte heading towards Elisabeth, leading with her fangs.    

Needless to say, I took my sweet time perusing the veggies convinced that they would sort it out amongst themselves.  I quickly moved on to bribery, though, when we passed the cookies covered with M&Ms in the dessert section.  Bribery definitely works for 4 yr olds, but she wasn't the one in need of bribing.  We picked up the shopping pace and headed towards the checkout.  The biting escalated, and I made a fatal mistake.  I told Elisabeth she could get out of the cart.  Of course, right then and there we had your stereotypical terrible two grocery store meltdown.  Luckily this is kid #2, and these sorts of meltdowns have an edge of humor to them.  Mr. Bob the Checkout Man slipped me some chocolate which made it better.

After I collected the 19 month old up off of the floor (literally face down on the floor in the middle of the store...), we were off to wait for our guests.  Let the weekend of the dropsies begin...

Nana and PopPop were coming bearing a betta fish for Elisabeth as a surprise for her birthday.  Let's just say that during the transfer from travel fishbowl to permanent fishbowl - that betta fish went all Nemo on Nana and is now swimming freely in a pond somewhere (hopefully not the big pond in the sky...).  Who knew that betta fish are notorious for flinging themselves out of their containers??  Well, now you all do should you decide to get a betta.  Nana was terribly saddened over both the loss of the surprise and the poor fishy, so while Elisabeth, Doug, Jen and PopPop headed out for a hike, Nana, Charlotte and I headed to two pet stores in search of a replacement.  Of course Nemo was the perfect betta - blue and yellow!  We couldn't replicate Nemo, but we got a darn good fish.  He has been named Fish Prince Charming Charming Charming and goes to bed with Elisabeth each night (I have struggled with not making a "sleeps with the fishes" joke, but look - I failed)

Shortly after the fish debacle, I made a misstep and shattered half of one of Charlottes beloved stacking dolls.  It shattered into no fewer than 32 pieces.  I was crushed (sort of like a stomped wooden stacking doll) because that is Charlotte's absolute favorite toy.  And not a cheap toy!

So two bad things down, one remains right?  Oh, think again.

Fast forward 20 minutes to lunch.  We got everyone settled in for deli meat sandwiches.  I sat down to eat and Elisabeth said, "Mommy, could I please have more grape juice?"  Happy to reward such a nice way of asking I said of course.  I had that juice in my hands and then something - we're guessing a leprechaun - knocked it up and out and onto the floor where the top broke into 4 pieces and grape juice went everywhere.  We're talking a 4 foot radius.  It was the sort of fall that you swear takes 30 seconds to happen.  I can see the disaster as its about to happen, yet I can't fix it.  The saving grace is that it was white grape juice.  So Doug and I got on the floor and scrubbed.  Keep this in mind.

We successfully made it about 5 hours until the next "oops" which happened when Nana went to put some leftover chicken kebabs in the fridge.  (As an aside, I tried to replicate the kabob e joojeh from our favorite Rose Restaurant.  I used some variation of this recipe and Doug said it turned out really good.)  As I'm sure you can gather, that chicken also ended up pulling a Nemo.  But luckily it almost all ended up on the inside of the fridge.  But even that that ended up on the floor was deemed edible by me, since - hey - Doug and I had just cleaned that part of the floor.

So we have Nemo, the stacking doll, grape juice, and chicken.  Bad things happen in threes?  Try fives.  Today, Charlotte wanted orange juice.  I'm sure you can see where this is going.  But - I successfully navigated getting the orange juice out of the fridge and into a sippy cup.  I even got the OJ back into the fridge and got the sippy cup in Charlotte's hot little hands.  It was at this point that I turned around to grab my Coke and hear the sound of something pouring on the ground.  Although I got the OJ into the sippy cup I, apparently, failed at properly closing the sippy cup and out came the Fantastik and towels to clean yet another large swath of our floor.  At this point we figure we've covered about 50% of our kitchen floor and that means we've gotten a big chunk of our spring cleaning out of the way.

So if bad things happen in 3s, I guess we have one more coming.  Any guesses??