failure to communicate-- or was it a communication of failure?

It would seem that I should be fired from having to watch my own children based on recent history. (I can hear most of the parents who read this blog saying to themselves, "Ah, if it were only that easy...") To be fair, I have had to watch them a little bit more the last couple weeks, so some craziness was bound to happen... but to put it in perspective, "more" means I went from watching them somewhere in the neighborhood of two hours a day to perhaps four-- not enough to [whine] and moan about.

This particular revelation of "epic fail" came about 7:00pm. I had been watching Judah when a crisis erupted-- well, it wasn't really a crisis, but almost everything is a crisis to Elijah when things aren't just so. AND he's loud, and quite destructive-- he's been a headbutter since 8 months, and whacking and throwing things since a year. Somewhere, my father is grinning bigger than you can imagine. (Two points of clarification: 1) my father is very much alive, lest you should think somewhere is the "great white cloud of mystery" and 2) Elijah is just like me when I was a baby--- something my father has reminded me of when LJ had colic, LJ wouldn't eat, LJ was incredibly defiant at 15 months old, etc... I think he just loves me getting my payback with Elijah). This story, though, isn't about Elijah. He was just the red herring that drew my attention away for five minutes while the real drama was about to unfold. After I had talked him down from the ledge that a bath wasn't going to be all that bad in TEN minutes (we weren't going anywhere just yet), I came back in and made sure Judah was playing happily before starting LJ's bath water up. When I came back, Elijah was putting his puzzle together happily in the kitchen, and Judah was cooing (cooing!) in the living room. Aaaaah. Way to go, dad. Another battle won.

When I got up again to go turn the bath water off, I smelled something funny-- a bit like blueberries. Blueberries? This little fortress has smelled like a lot of things, but never blueberries. "Rach," I yelled at the Queen, "is there any reason the house would smell like blueberries?"

"Shouldn't be," she said. "I gave Elijah some blueberry yogurt ten minutes ago, but he stopped eating it when he did his puzzle."

Every once in awhile, I have a Sherlock Holmes moment. The pieces to the case align before me, and I know! I wished this one had left me in the dark. Slowly walking to the living room, I peered around the corner to see Judah cooing as he happily smeared (you guessed it) blueberry yogurt over table, carpet, couch-- anything his hands could paint. The fragrance wafted deliciously through the whole house.

"My love," I called down to the basement, "next time might you let me know when we leave the yogurt out?" She laughed-- I get the idea I've done this to her a few times too :)