You did what?

Parenting a child with ADD is a daily exercise in patience. They do the most interestingly creative things. Like this.

One evening I was making dinner. My oldest daughter was away at a friends house, and my younger two were upstairs playing together. They were playing quite nicely (which is beyond rare, and should have been my first clue that something was seriously wrong). I could hear them upstairs playing house. My middle one playing mommy and my little one playing the baby. I could hear their little angelic voices as they played out their game. Until I called them down to eat.

They came downstairs covered in a fine white powder. I immediately started grilling my middle one on where she got baby powder. A few weeks earlier she had amused herself greatly by shaking baby powder downstairs from the loft above "Look mom, it's snowing!!", and I was quite sure I had removed all the baby powder that had survived the blizzard from the house. My little one replies "It's not baby powder, sissy took flour and eggs upstairs, we were making a cake". I looked at the middle child and asked "How bad is it?", "Pretty bad, mom" she replied (hey, at least she's honest). So upstairs I go to survey the damage. I find our loft covered in the fine white powder, and discover that it is in fact not flour but powdered sugar. Yay, not only is it all over everything, it's sticky too!! I find the egg carton and no sign of any cracked eggs, what a relief. I served the kids some dinner and set to work cleaning up the mess. I used a sponge to wipe the powdered sugar from every flat surface in the loft, and then started to vacuum up the mess off the carpet. It doesn't take long for the sugary goodness that is powdered sugar to gunk up the vacuum though, so I have to call it a night. Before going to bed I took the vacuum apart, cleaned all the sticky out, and left the filter and parts to dry until morning.

The next day:

I woke up early and re-assembled my vacuum cleaner (who would have guessed that one of the prerequisites for being a mommy was knowledge of basic mechanics) and went upstairs to finish the clean up. Upon arrival upstairs, I was greeted by a smell that can only mean one thing. They did play with the eggs! I have no idea how many, but the smell tells me they are there. SO now I'm on an egg hunt, but one that's not nearly as fun as Easter. I find a couple cracked in the bathroom trash can, a couple in a bucket, one stuck to a stuffed cat's tail (could be worse, could have been the real cat), and the best of all, one cracked into one half of a Valentines candy heart and placed on the dresser under the window with the sun shining in on it (and have I mentioned we live in Arizona). So I get the trash can and begin pitching everything that has the egg goo on it, and then I finish vacuuming up the powdered sugar.

I come downstairs to find my darling two children (who have been playing nice and quiet while I was cleaning upstairs) have taken all the spaghetti out of my pantry, broken it into inch long pieces, covered my front room floor with it, and are pretending the room is a barn, with the spaghetti being the hay.