Mischevious meets Mayhem

Someone told me last week that they miss hearing about my boys' regularly occurring antics. Sweet little testimonials about the wonderful virtues of my son's are fine every once and awhile, but they wanted a good laugh. And my boys are the classic examples of what sort of mischevious behavior boys are inherently born with.

I've been sitting on this one for awhile.

My sweet little low maintenance Andrew has been testing me. Jason and I are sometimes in awe of how easy going he is. Ben lived in a perpetual state of time out from the ages of 2-5. He was always testing our limits of sanity. My mom calls it righteous justice. Atonement for what she went through with me as a kid.

I call it the Y factor. Once boys realize that they have the Y chromosone, something happens in their little brains and their mission is to now terrorize anyone without the Y chromosone.

Andrew has recently realized that he carries the Y chormosone.

It all starts off simply. Playing with the water in the sink in the bathroom. Soaking our hand towels and filling up little cups of water to "accidentally" spill on the floor. Insisting on taking baths in our tub, and bringing all their toys into our shower. The tub looks like a little concentration camp of little army men on every ledge, corner and surface. Scratching almost every DVD in our house because they can't seem to see the case that they just stepped on. This is all minor stuff. It was when Andrew had aspirations of joining the big leagues that I got worried.

He went from playing in the sink to flooding the bathroom. He clogged up the sink drain with toilet paper, and stopped up the sink. Then he left the water on, and WALKED AWAY. He was in there for such a short time, that I didn't think anything of it, until Jason walked in on the flood 15 minutes later. I got about 10 gallons of water off that floor.

Even this was nothing compared to

The Hershey's Disaster of '09.

I sent Ben off to school with his carpool, and went into my room to check my emails and call Jason. Andrew came in about 15 minutes later with Hershey's syrup all over his hands.

As the alarm bells wailed in my head I slowly walked into the living room to find this:





Andrew had taken a full bottle of Hershey's syrup and walked a circuit from the kitchen, through the living room and back to the fridge while squeezing syrup on the floor. I think it was the 21st century version of Hansel and Gretel laying down bread crumbs so that they wouldn't get lost in the forest. Apparently Andrew feared that he might never find his way back to the fridge. He stopped along his circuit to heavily squirt some of our living room's major focal points. I guess they were his version of Kodak scenery shots. One of the heaviest hit points was the brand new ottoman. He was very generous with the syrup here, and did me another favor by rubbing it in real good with his hands. Hence, the syrupy hands that he was displaying to me to please wash for him.

I very rarely see "red". But this was one of those moments. I washed him up, sent a hysterical Andrew to his room in his pull up, and called my support system. I needed to be talked down. I was halfway up my bell tower, figuratively speaking. Two hours later, I was emotionally and physically exhausted. With my living room smelling faintly like chocolate I went to go get Andrew, who had cried himself to sleep. Although I'm not quite laughing about it, I will most assuredly remember that story for forever!