She continues to amaze us

This weekend we have friends (former neighbors) from Buffalo, NY visiting. On Saturday I hosted a ladies night out at my house, for all the neighbors to get together and visit with Amy.

The party was supposed to start at 7:30 -- Wayne had left a little before 7:00 to go see the new Indiana Jones movie and avoid the estrogen fest. So it was just Amy and I prepping appetizers and doing last minute cleaning to get ready.

At 7:15, I come downstairs from doing I can't remember what and see Marissa sitting on the couch saying, "Mommy, look what I did..." in that same tone of voice she uses when she's done she wasn't supposed to do. Here on the couch are 8 beautiful vertical lines, drawn in our guest's non-washable crayon. Amy's jaw dropped -- she'd only been out of the room for less than 60 seconds.

So I put Marissa in her room for a time-out while I washed up the couch. I heard bumping and thumping from up there, and knew that she was emptying her bookshelf of her books. She usually does this then carefully puts them away when you go to get her out of her timeout. But it took me a bit longer to clean the couch, and by the time I got upstairs she had pulled EVERY book off the bookshelf...and then peed on them in the middle of the room.

It is amazing the child is still alive.

By this time people are arriving and I am spending more time upstairs attempting to get this child calmed down than greeting people.

I pulled all the books out of her room and put them into ours -- she lost the privilege to have books if that's how she's going to treat them, and she's going to have to earn them back. Then I put her in her pajamas and told her that she is going to bed. I closed the door to her screaming and crying, and checked back in 10 minutes.

I check back, amazingly so, Marissa found one other area that I didn't think of to mess up, and that's the remnants of her diapers and wipes, which she pulled out and put all over the room. So once again, cleaning up a mess and scolding her at the same time, then putting her back in bed.

By this time she was finally accepting of the fact that no matter what, she was not getting out of her room, she was not going downstairs, she was going to go to sleep. And within a matter of minutes she was asleep.

Great. I went downstairs, got myself a glass of wine and sat next to the damp couch cushion so I could warn people not to sit there.

Whew!