Why I Haven't Been Blogging

Oh, how I love this kid. He really makes life...interesting. This is Jackson, The (NOT SO) Innocent.

Right now I'm listening to him tell Jeff exactly where he can find the cookie dough. "It's right there in the refrigerator. Open the door, Daddy! Right there! Right there next to the salsa. See it? Look at it! I want some of that after I eat my good lunch very nicely. It's right there by the salsa. See it?"

Anyways, it's not yet noon and it has been a full, full day.

Jeff spent until 11:00 trying to unclog the toilet. Jackson put "something" down it (again) on Saturday and the bathroom has been locked since. Jeff finally fished out the problem...Laura's hairbrush. Jackson said "Oh yeah, I put that in there before we went to the birthday party." In the last few weeks, he has flushed a Tupperware cup (a real Tupperware cup...NOT happy!), several headbands and bows, a block, and who knows what else. We have gotten to know a local plumber real well. Today, Jeff just invested in our own "thingy" so he can fish out whatever goes down instead of having a plumber come. Good call, hon!

I spent 2 hours this morning putting Jackson's dresser back together and supervising him as he put his clothes back in it. I had made the mistake of leaving him unattended for about 10 minutes this morning while I cleaned up after breakfast. After we finished putting away all the clothes, we decided to go ahead and straighten up the closet. We found: a broken book end (ceramic...read: knife blades for a 3 year-old boy), some clips that he thinks are scissors (he was telling me about those last week and I've been living in dread waiting for the day we found the scissors he had stashed in there. Thankfully it's just some harmless clips), some shredded paper that I don't recognize, and some money.

Then, we spent a little while searching for a mouse trap that mysteriously went missing sometime between the hours of 5:30 and 10:30 yesterday morning. Our theory is that the snake that's been living in our garage (he's got a good food source with the mice and frogs that we see regularly) somehow got caught in the trap and carried it off somewhere. We live in a neighborhood, people! Things like this should not be happening here! The door from the garage to the backyard was left open about two inches for about half an hour this morning. We suspect that whatever we caught tried to make a run for it during that time. It didn't make it far...we found the mousetrap shredded in Kate's dog house with nothing left of whatever carried it into the backyard.

Now, the mousetrap thing cannot be blamed on Jackson but the other things are only a few stories that I have on him these days. He's a little tornado of craziness, boyishness, sweetness, stinky-ness, messiness, kisses, creativeness, and mischievousness.

He's a big swimmer and swims well with his life jacket at the lake (below) or without it at the pool (no pics because I'm all hands on deck at the pool).

Addi jumps in feet first and swims for the ladder. Jackson leaps, belly flops, swims to the ladder with a few detours to catch swimming bugs, hangs backwards off the ladder for a while, then climbs up to start all over. This is our boy flying through the air in his signature jump.

He might not do things the traditional way, but he will always get it done if it's something he wants to do. This applies to eating an orange, taking apart a dresser, peeing, getting something off the top shelf in his closet, peeing, riding his bike, etc.

The other night, he snuck out of his room and found some permanent fabric glue. He came and found me right away to give me a hug and just happened to sweetly mention that he didn't know how the soap got on his bed. When he took me to see, I found that he had glued his sheets together and there were globs of glue on the carpet. We quickly washed the sheets in hot, hot water before the glue set. They're just stained, but not stiff and gross. The carpet is forever ruined though...stiff with glue. That's okay because we'll be getting new carpet when Jackson moves out of the house anyways.

A few days before that he dumped out an entire bottle of lotion while trying to just get some for his hands. It just happened to be on the carpet by my bed, right where Kate lays. We cleaned it up the best we can but the remaining lotion has clung to the dirt that Kate leaves behind so the carpet is disgusting back there. But it's okay because like I said before, we're getting new carpet in a few years when he moves out.

He's not always destructive though, believe it or not. He does some great things and can build some awesome train tracks. I've been taking pictures of a few of the tracks he's built recently. He spends hours building them just right and then finds us to show us. He hardly ever drives the trains on them anymore, just builds them to admire.





I really don't know what we would do with ourselves without this boy in our lives. He makes me crazy sometimes but he's so darn sweet and says the funniest things that I cannot help but to love him. He just keeps me on my toes so my bottom rarely rests in front of the computer. But I do love him.

I do.