Author: Shannon

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning and it wasn’t me although I am seriously considering going back to bed and pulling the covers up over my head.

So there’s this bench.

It’s a bench I’ve been coveting online for about a month now and it would go perfectly in our entryway.  It’s more than reasonably priced (I haven’t seen anything that’s just like it anywhere else, which is a plus, but anything else that serves the same purpose runs at least $100 more — and that’s on sale).  After leaving it open in my browser for weeks Matt finally said that we should go ahead and get the thing.  Then came the rub: the online shipping instructions said that we should “allow 4-6 weeks” for shipping.

Because we’ve ordered from this place before and the last time we received our packages in 2-3 weeks (missing being out of town by about 2 days, if I recall correctly) we decided to play it safe for our vacation this year and have it shipped to the house of some friends in the neighborhood.  That way if we’re out of town when it’s delivered they can keep it for us for a bit and if we’re here I could run right over and pick it up after we received delivery confirmation.  Yesterday we received notice that it had shipped (three days after placing the order) and that it would be here today.

I was keeping an eye on it online before I left to run errands, but it still said it was “out for delivery” on the truck.  I even called Matt to check as I pulled out of the grocery store so that I could run by and get it while I was still out.  Matt checked and it was a no-go.  I got home, unloaded the groceries, and immediately checked it again (I had a feeling) to find that it had been delivered.

I quickly put Liam back into his carseat (he was not excited) and left as fast as I could since it was 12:05 and he needed to have lunch and be down by 1:00 (Liam was even less excited when we managed to pass his favorite park and he squealed with delight, only to find that we weren’t slowing down.  Poor kid).  I went to our friends’ house and found nothing at the door.  I called Matt who IMd one of the people who live in the house to which the package was supposedly delivered to make sure the dogs were in the house and not in the backyard and then I starting poking around like a criminal.  There was nothing out front, nothing at the side door, and nothing (that I could see) out back, either.  I called Matt back and he looked at the detailed information on the FedEx website and told me that it said “left at front door.”  Clearly, this was either not the case or someone had made off with a large 35 pound box in the span of the 10 minutes it took me to get there.  I started walking around looking at the nearby neighbors’ front doors (looking a bit less like a criminal since I now had Liam and my purse in tow).  Nothing.  It then occurs to me and Matt (who was still on the phone) that the name of the street I was on was the same as an adjacent street, with a different suffix.

I got back in the car and started driving slowly down the other street with the same name (which is a much-used cut-through in the neighborhood, so I passed at least 10 cars while trying to track down the same street number as our friends’ house on a different street looking for all the world, again, like a criminal).  When I found the house, there was our package, in full view, on the front porch.  I pulled over and didn’t see any cars in the drive but did see a ton of kid things in the yard and on the porch so I knew that it was still possible that someone was home and I didn’t want to ring the doorbell and wake up any sleeping children.  I decided to pull in the driveway and knock on the door.  No one appeared to be home.

I grabbed the box (with my name and the correct address clearly written on the front) and the FedEx slip off the door and hurriedly took it back to my car where I eventually stuffed it into the trunk (looking this time like a straight-up thief except that if it were the case it would have made much more sense for me to steal the $600 running stroller that was sitting right next to our box) and drove off.

This bench better be worth all the hype.

Five minutes ago I gave Liam a full sippy cup with the hopes that it would hold him over until I could get lunch together.  He just returned with an empty sippy cup with suspicious splatters.  He kept pointing to his room so I went with him.  I went to pick him up to expedite the process when I realized that what must be the majority of the contents of the sippy cup are now all over the front of his clothes.  He was soaked to the skin (and now so am I).  I now have an hour to find out where else in my house there is milk (or I guess I could wait a few days and sniff everything until I zero in on the sour stench), give Liam lunch, and give him a bath (there was so much milk in his shirt that when I took it off it soaked his hair and it’s already sour and slightly crunchy).  I have no idea how this happened but I feel sure that blogging about it while the clock is ticking was the right decision.

Near the very top of my least favorite parenting things to do is to change the diaper pail.  This is partially linked to my experience as a nanny, but that’s another (much too long, much too involved) story.  So today when I went in there to change the pail and took it out by the front door only to open the front of the pail and have all the diapers fall out on the floor because the bag insert was empty, let’s just say it wasn’t pleasant.  My living room now smells like a rest stop.  Fantastic.

Since Liam got big enough to reach the cords on the couch, we’ve stored our laptops in the back bedroom on the desk (don’t ask why we didn’t start out with them in there…).  This system has worked well for about a year now.

Today the fun is over.

Liam has already taken to flipping the switch on the front of the Sony to turn the internet off (I can’t even count the number of times I was completely flummoxed by the fact that the internet appeared to be working downstairs and on the Mac only to find that toddler fingers had intervened) and he’s unreasonably interested in trying to open the Mac and stick his fingers (and once, his tongue) into any USB port he can find.  He also has an affinity for crawling under the desk and trying to unplug the main power plug (again, at least one time using his tongue).  I knew when we were looking at houses that I would have preferred a house with high ceilings.  What I didn’t know was that we would actually need those high ceilings for more than an open feeling, we’d need them to store all the things that Liam can now reach that are dangerous.  I envision shelves that reach up to 10-foot-tall ceilings with some sort of library ladder system to access all of our belongings, but I digress…

Our (lotto level) plan was to incorporate a work-station into the kitchen redesign to include a small desk area where all plugs and cords could be neatly stored in such a way that little hands couldn’t reach (or even see) them.  We tend to use our laptops as newspapers so it’d be nice from a logistical standpoint as well.  Well–it could take a decade (or a new house–which could be more than a decade) before we have a place for the laptops in any sort of redesigned kitchen (at which point we won’t have any little hands in the house–simply medium-sized ones that understand (and actually listen) to the word NO, knock on wood) so the laptops have got to be moved.  Today.  Right now.