Nothing to See Here…

Did you hear?  Three is the new two.  No, really!

Baby Rae-Rae isn’t a little baby anymore.  She’s a terrorist.  She’s obviously fallen in with the wrong crowd.  I wonder if her parents know what sort of juvenile delinquency she is up to!  I should write them a strongly worded letter. 

Oh, wait.

See, here’s the problem.  Baby-jail is down.  Baby-jail was a perfectly legal corralling device we had used to keep our sweet little schnookums in the family room where people could surf the Internet in peace and Sponge-Bob played 24/7.  A paradise, really.

But then we went and potty-trained her.  Yeah, you’d think we would have learned our lesson back when we taught her to walk, and to talk.  We keep teaching her things and they all come back to bite us in the ass.  So we potty-trained her and suddenly she wanted and needed access to the bathroom.  Let’s face it - peeing behind the sofa just isn’t acceptable.  So down came baby-jail. 

Our lives have not been the same since.  (We miss you, baby-jail!)

Giving Rae access to the bathroom also meant giving her access to the house at large.  And, frankly, we’re not responsible enough in our parenting to have that situation.

The child wreaks havoc upon our home.  Just in the past couple months, I’ve had multiple wall murals (pencil, marker, eye make-up, whatever), a floor mural (purple nail polish), old black Halloween greasepaint all over the wall and carpeting, wads of toilet paper shoved down the sink, body-spray extravaganzas, marker drawings on the carpeting (upstairs landing, two of the stairs, and family room — three separate incidents.)

She’s killing me.

She got in big trouble last time.  Her daddy is running out of patience and I see him eyeing the switches on the willow tree in the back yard.  OK, not really (we don’t even have a willow tree in the back yard!), but he did put the fear of God into her.  When she calmed down, she climbed up on my lap and said “I neber eber do it again.  I pwomise.” and was all affectionate and kissy huggy.  I think she learned that technique from Osama bin Laden’s kid (Hey, maybe she went to the same preschool, how would we know - we can’t find the son-of-a-bitch, right??  He could be in St. Louis.)

The next day is when the two middle stairs got colored in with a nice shade of teal from the Crayola “No, it won’t come out of your carpet” line of markers.

I’m at my wit’s end (and let’s face it, my wit was never all that long to begin with.)  We can’t keep her from the bathroom.  We’ve tried installing a gate at the top of the stairs (it won’t stay at the bottom unless we jury-rig it or install hardware.)  She barrelled through it in desperation for her pacifier.  She has the technology to outwit the gates.  And her parents.

I’ve joked many times about chaining the kids up to the furnace in the basement, but that option is looking more and more appealing.

My husband is a technology geek and thinks we should put closed circuit cameras all through the house, maybe install an RF-ID chip in her so we can track her whereabouts on our wirelessly-enabled laptops (while we surf the net, of course).  (Anything so we don’t have to get up and tail her, lurking around corners, like some unpaid private investigator.)

I’m thinking of lending her out to the current administration.  First, she’s smarter than GWB, and second, I figure if they just turn their backs for one moment pretending to be busy with something else, with her penchant for sneaking off to places no one thinks to check, she could just lead them right to Osama.