Backyard Fun

So, it's been a while since I've regaled y'all with tales from our lair. It's been a full few months, including such adventures as finding out we are expecting another wiggly little Jelly Bean in December, moving 600 miles to another state, purchasing a dental practice, making a trip to visit family over 700 miles away, and beginning plans to build a home. Whew!, you say. Whew! is right. It has been full, but that doesn't mean the fun has stopped. Of course it hasn't. And so, without further ado, here is the kind of story that is the reason you read this blog.
Since we've moved in (just over a month now), I have felt very much like a pregnant mom, in other words, I've felt like a pot-bellied slug with a bowl of melted cheese for a brain. (No offense to any other pregnant moms out there. I wish I was one of those high-functioning, "glowing" pregos that is a blessing to everyone around her. I'm grateful for the ability to have children, but those 9 months don't seem to suit me well.)  On one particularly pregnant afternoon, I let the kids have yogurt and in a rare brain-functioning moment, sent them to the backyard to do so, so that we could prevent the inevitable yogurt-finger-painting of the table surface. Shortly after I'd begun enjoying the peace in the house, Judsen walks in and tells me he's done with his yogurt. I go outside to check, and no, he's got quite a bit left. I ask him to finish, compliment Felicity on doing a good job eating hers, and go back inside. All is well.
This time they're gone for quite some time and I'm reading my book, thinking how glad I am that they're having fun together. Yea for childhood.
I'm just about ready to get up and look for a snack myself when suddenly, a Creature from the Purple, Sticky, Gloppy, Berry-Speckled Lagoon appears in the doorway, hollering delightedly, "Mom! I'm a mess!!" (four words that send shivers down a mother's spine) I walk outside and onto the scene of a horror film. There is yogurt EVERYWHERE!! It's smeared on the patio furniture, on the sidewalks, the sides of our house, and fully caking both my children. Baby Swamp Creature is also covered in purple yogurt and is making handprints on every surface she can find. How can 8 innocent ounces do all this??
At this point I order them into my bathroom to get clean, knowing somewhere in the back of my now-less-than-functioning brain that this is probably a bad idea. However, I need them contained somewhere else so I can clean the patio and prevent more desert creepy-crawlies than normal from visiting us. I scrub down the chairs as best I can and return to the bathroom to find a still-dairy-encrusted child sitting on top of each bathroom counter at a sink, with their hands cupped around the faucet to turn it into a high-powered water gun, the water running full blast and them spraying each other across the bathroom! Now there is water everywhere, they are both still disgusting, and Mama is mad! (Although at this point, a portion of the anger is directed at myself, because as I mentioned before, I really did know this was a distinct possibility if I sent them into the bathroom alone.)
I pick them both up by the scruff of the neck, haul them to their bathroom, and leave them to bathe while I clean up Disaster #2.
Josh gets home about this time and wanders into their bathroom to check on them. He starts hollering expletives and I run in to see what the problem is now. I don't make it to the bathroom before the flood from Noah's ark greets me in the hall. The kids have turned the water in the bathtub back on (which they know is forbidden), fully flooded their bathroom, and have gotten a good start on the rest of the house. It took us 7 bath towels to even begin controlling all the water. Unfortunately we don't seem to own enough bath towels to begin controlling our offspring.
Yogurt fights are not the only fun that begins in our backyard. We have roadrunners that frequent our bushes. Felicity calls them "ro-ro". It's really cute. We also have all kinds of ants, centipedes, cockroaches, and an occasional scorpion to gawk at. There's rocks to throw and a back wall to climb, although we would never have thought our children could scale it until one evening when they were playing outside and we were inside talking to a couple guys from church. All of a sudden we hear Felicity crying and Judsen shouting for us, with an unusual desperate tone to his voice. We hurry out to find him on the opposite side of the wall, with one leg on top and his arms full to the brim with rocks. He is also barefoot and shirtless. Felicity is barefoot, standing on the xeriscaped stretch next to the fence. It's all pointy rocks, but there she was, trying to scale the fence and crying not because Judsen was gone, but because she couldn't go with him. After rescuing Judsen and scolding them both about climbing the fence, he told us calmly, "But these are dinosaur teeth. I had to go get them." He had scaled the fence that is taller than he is, with no shoes or shirt, climbed down the 8-foot rock wall behind our house, gathered rocks or "dinosaur teeth" from the empty desert, climbed back up with his arms totally full and then almost made it back over the fence without being caught. And all in the name of science. If it's good enough for those paleontologists on the National Geographic shows we watch, surely it's a good idea for 3-year old Judsen, who in spite of the firm talking-to we had about how dangerous it is to go wandering through the desert alone, gave us quite a lecture on the "teeth" he found, what dinosaurs they were from and how many millions of years old they were.
Yikes. If anyone asks me, I'd say have stupid kids. Your life will be far less entertaining, but a heck of a lot easier. Also, don't have a backyard. It appears that will make life easier, too.