No Guarantees

For those of you who think there are no guarantees in life, I'm about to rock your world.

Here are some Parenthood Guarantees:

1. When you are in the bathroom, no matter how long or how short your little darlings have been playing quietly, as soon as you are in an uninterruptible condition, someone will get hit/bitten/pushed/scratched/punched or otherwise maimed ensuring that the ensuing chaos drags your unwilling and half dressed body back into the living room. The one with the big windows that face the road.

2. The children get up to the same antics whenever you get within a two foot radius of a telephone. 

3. No matter how hard you plan and take into consideration your children's eating idiosyncrasies, most night's you're going to hear "Yuck! I'm not eating this!" over and over and over again.

4. If you have three children, one of them is going to fall asleep on the drive to and from some activity. This inevitably creates a free pass to an 11:00 PM bedtime. 

5. As soon as the bathroom is cleaned, your toilet-trained-for-two-years four year old will pee all over the toilet, floor and shower curtain because your house was inexplicably designed to have the bathtub and its the shower curtain a foot away from the toilet.

6. No matter how hard you try to be early, someone is going to have to go to the bathroom/need their diaper changed just before you go out the door.

7. As soon as your husband gets on that airplane for parts unknown, it's open season on snow storms, hurricanes, the car breaking down, you locking yourself of your house or car or both.

8. If your house houses scissors, they will be used to cut hair. Particularly four year old hair by your four year old.

9. Even if you have washable markers for your children to use, it will be the black permanent marker for parcels that you keep hidden high up in the closet that one (or more) of them find to redecorate the walls, couch, refrigerator, toys, paperwork… I could go on but I'm still being surprised by the ingenious locations that the little juvenile delinquents graffiti artists have managed to find in this house.

And finally, two small snapshots from our current lives that proves our four year old is not yet wise in the art of subterfuge though I do fear he has found his lives calling.