it's never quiet 'round this here part

The 3 little ducklings try to color together for the first time. While the activity is new, the noise isn't.

speechless

Yesterday at 5:30 pm, I got a call from the husband, "I'm DONE! I'm DONE! here, you talk to him."

"Mommy, I'm mad at Daddy! Daddy hurt my feelings! I don't like it, Daddy!" the little man said in between sobs.

I got the whole story when they came home. Daddy and the little man had a race on who could get to the car faster and when Daddy won, the little man threw a tantrum.

Fast forward to this morning. "Matty, don't fight with Daddy today when he picks you up," I said.

"Mommy, I need to. Cons why [because] I want YOU to pick me up!"

I was stunned for a few seconds but recovered nicely. "Matty, I can't pick you up. And if you don't want Daddy to pick you up, you're going to have to walk home. And it's a long way home!"

"Huh?" he said.

Now, we're both speechless.

lovely day gone bad

With the high for the day topping 80 degrees, I thought what a great day to go to the mall and let Matty enjoy riding his favorite train. How was I to know it was going to end up as bad as it did? Neither the fact that the husband complained of body ache even before we left the house, nor the fact that Matty started the day whining at 5:30AM gave me a single clue.

For $2 a person, who wouldn't have fun riding in this?

Enjoying the ride with me in the blue car.

There was some sort of family happenning and we enjoyed a lot of Storm Troopers, Padawans, Imperial Guards, Darth Vader, and even Young Anakin. I don't know why Daddy (the Star Wars geek) didn't want his picture taken with Darth, though?

Daddy and the girls waiting for us to ride the train.

So far so good, right? Little did I know that Matty was planning on riding the train again, but this time with his Daddy. Daddy wanted to go home but went ahead and agreed. All the 4 train cars had people in it. If they wanted to go ahead and ride, they would have be in the cars with someone else. Matty refused. Apparently, he wanted to ride on the red one and that one was already full. So they stayed behind until the next ride (they should get first pick of which train they wanted to get in to since they were in the front of the line). By this time, I left them to enjoy the ride so that I could go browse in one of the stores.

When I saw the train pass me, I saw Matty and Daddy in the black and not the red and Matty was screaming and crying. Why wasn't he in the red one? Here's the story... When Daddy and Matty were about to get in the red car, the family behind them (family of 5) asked if they could get in the red one since it's the only car that was big enough to hold all of them. Well, well, well... wouldn't you know it, Daddy said yes. So they went and rode in the black one instead. It was a bad decision on Daddy's part, but to his defense he said he wasn't thinking straight because he was in pain.

From the moment they got off the train, the tantrum intensified. Daddy grabbed the stroller from me and pushed on ahead of us because he has finally reached his limit. So there I was trying to hold a 3 year old who was having a full body fit. It was hard enough to be carrying a 40 lb toddler, but a screaming, squirming, tired and sleepy toddler?

The planets definitely didn't align for this trip.