boys will be boys

I find it ironic that the day after I start reading James Dobson's Bringing Up Boys, this is the kind of day I experienced yesterday:

It began with Ben having a blow-out diaper, the likes of which I haven't seen since before he started solids two months ago. The mess went up his back and under his left armpit. Not exactly what I wanted to deal with at 6:45 in the morning. (And, yes, I realize this doesn't really have anything to do with him being a boy, but once you see how the rest of the day went, you'll understand.)

Then by 7:30 Sean had managed to drop his cup of applesauce on the carpet in the dining room while eating breakfast. Did you know that a cup of applesauce, when dropped on the floor at one end of a 6-foot table, can leave a splatter trail that goes the length of that entire table, all the way to underneath the chair at the other end? Seriously, Sean and I could have conducted a physics experiment on the trajectory of applesauce.

Throughout the morning Ben managed to 1) pull the vent out of the floor in the dining room and then stick his entire arm, all the way up to his shoulder, down the hole; 2) take out an outlet cover from an electrical outlet (a lot of good that one did); 3) crawl over to the landing at the top of the stairs, get on his belly and inch his way forward until he nosedived down the one step onto the landing, then continue scooting until he was all the way on the landing and could crawl around in circles to his heart's content (fortunately, I had actually remembered to put the gate up at the top of the stairs, so at least the landing was as far as he could go); 4) try to pull himself up onto the vacuum cleaner, but ended up knocking it over instead (I still don't know how he didn't whack himself with the thing); and 5) pull a box filled with packing peanuts off of the bench in the living room.

And Sean topped off the morning/early afternoon by refusing to swallow his last bite of lunch. So a 45-minute battle of the wills ensued, which delayed both his and Ben's naps by 30 minutes to an hour. Fortunately, both boys ended up napping well, the evening was much more mellow, and the day ended much sweeter than it began.

I may have boys, and I may (and do) love them dearly, but I'm not made to handle multiple days in a row like that. Here's hoping I never have to.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that this was the day that Ben also discovered the cat food. And when Sean saw that Ben had discovered the cat food, he quickly made his way over there to show Ben how to pick up pieces of cat food and drop it one by one into the water bowl. Fortunately, I caught them at it before there was too much food in the water, but this doesn't bode well for the tag-teaming they'll soon be doing, I'm sure.