Slacking

Charley and Zander like to play this game where they make me lie on my bed, they bring me pretend food and drinks from their "kitchen," and then they proceed to tuck me in for bed by going through their own nighttime rituals, like singing songs, reading me stories, and giving me a face massage. So we decided to play this game a couple days ago, and I must have been really exhausted because somewhere during this process I dozed off.

I must have only fallen asleep for about 15 minutes, but when I awoke I was a bit nervous because things were pretty quiet in the house. I quickly jumped out of bed and when I reached the hallway, I could hear the kids singing songs along with a cartoon on T.V. downstairs, so I figured all was well. I entered the office/guest bedroom and immediately realized that something was off when I saw a pad of paper sitting on the bed, completely covered in pen drawings. I glanced over at the desk and became even more nervous when I saw that the lid to the pen was sitting on the desk, but no pen.

I started heading down the stairs, checking the walls for pen marks. Nothing. I reached the bottom of the stairs and saw Zander peacefully sitting on the floor watching T.V. No problem there. Then I saw Charley sitting on the couch stripped down to only her underwear. While this may sound unusual to you, in our house this is a normal occurrence because Charley loves to play dress-up and frequently ends up nearly naked in the process. She too was quietly sitting there watching T.V., so I once again thought I was in the clear for any disasters.

Until I got closer to Charley that is. Charley was covered head-to-toe in pen. Every inch of her arms and legs was covered . . . her belly and chest were covered, with particular attention paid to her nipple area (???) . . . even her face was covered, as she had drawn a second set of eyebrows on her forehead, blush on her cheeks, and some lines down her nose for good measure. I couldn't help but start laughing and asked her who had drawn all over body. Her response? "Hmmm . . . I don't remember, Mom." Yeah, as if the whole thing had not just happened in the last 15 minutes.

Shortly after this, Brian got home from work and after getting a good laugh, he also asked Charley how she got pen all over. Again her response was that she couldn't remember. So he tried a different route. He asked her where the pen came from. "The office." He asked her where the pen was now. "On the table." He asked her who was holding the pen when the marks got all over her body. "Oh, I was Dad." Ahhh, mystery solved.

It took quite a bit of soap and scrubbing to get all the pen marks off, but we finally managed to get rid of all the "pen incident" evidence. The most shocking part of the evening, however, was the fact that for the FIRST TIME in my life as a mother, I failed to take a picture. What is up with that? I take hundreds of pictures every month, but I simply forgot to take one for this significant and entertaining event. I must be getting forgetful in my old age . . .