May Day part 2: Playing Babies

Here is the second part of the three part saga of That One Day.  All of the events chronicled did in fact take place on the same day.  I’m not compressing or embellishing for literary purposes.

 

 

 

Usually after the school drop-off life slows down a little.  The breathing space is critical to my sanity after the morning rush.  Unfortunately on this day Link and Gleek took advantage of the fact that my Mommy Radar was turned down several notches.  About 30 minutes after our arrival home, my radar alerted me to the fact that I’d failed to ping Gleek and Link for awhile.  I vaguely remembered them heading downstairs and so I began my search there.

 

I found them in the guest bedroom, stripped naked,  alternately jumping into, and climbing out of the playpen.  My rhetorical query: “what on earth do you think you’re doing?” was answered with an enthusiastic: “We’re playing babies!”  I put an end to the game by collapsing the playpen (thus discovering that they’d broken a board in the base of it) and ordering them up the stairs and into clothes.  I supervised long enough to be sure that clothes were being put on and went back to Patches who wanted to eat.

 

Within minutes I became aware of odd noises and thumps and giggles coming from upstairs in the room that Gleek and Patches shared.  By the time I’d reached the top of the stairs I’d identified the SCREEE sound as protests of abuse from Patches crib.  I attempted to open the door only to discover they’d locked it.

 

When my children lock the door it can only be for one of two reasons; They want to lock out other children or they want to lock out a parent because they know they are doing something that is verboten.  Fortunately whoever installed the doorknobs on my children’s bedrooms was wise in the ways of small children.  All of the doorknobs are easily pickable.  The moment Gleek and Link heard the sounds of mom-picking-the-lock, complete and utter silence replaced the giggles and jumping.  I opened the door to see two wide-eyed faces staring at me from inside Patches’ crib.  They were still “playing babies.”  It looked and sounded more like hyper-active monkeys to me.  I informed the babies firmly that the crib was off-limits except to actual babies  ie: Patches.  They obligingly climbed out, at which point Patches wailed and I went to attend to him.

 

Ten minutes later with Patches sated, I again became aware of thumps and giggles from upstairs.  I hiked back up the stairs to discover the door locked again.  I picked the lock again.  True to the letter of the law, Link and Gleek were not in the crib.  Instead I found Gleek jumping up and down on her mattress.  Bedding was strewn across the room tornado fashion.  Link was nowhere to be seen.  I soon determined that Link was underneath the bed that Gleek was jumping on.  He was trying to figure out why the bed made that crack noise when he “Wa-pounded” it.

 

I doubt the term wa-pound is familiar to anyone outside our family.  People who play Nintendo Mario Bros games will probably be familiar with the term ground-pound.  A wa-pound is the same thing only charmingly mispronounced.  For those who have forgotten or don’t play Mario Bros, a ground-pound is when one of those little electronic characters jumps as high as he can and spins and lands on his bottom, thus imparting extra kinetic force to the recipient of this maneuver.  It is a useful move to know because it inflicts more damage on the enemies.  Unfortunately in this case the enemy was the bed and damage was indeed inflicted.  Link succeeded in breaking a board in the bunkboard which supported Gleek’s mattress.

 

Who would have thought that “playing babies” could be so destructive?