Little Things; Funny Things

Ok - here it is now 2 a.m. and of course, though I could barely hold my eyes open about 2 hours ago, now, they don't want to go shut. Go figure!
So, I decided heck, may as well write up the silly goings-on in the house yesterday before I forget what they were. Things do fly in and out of my mind really quickly and though sometimes, I can retrieve a thought, more often than not, once it flys out, it's frequently "Gone With The Wind!"
So, here's the scene for the first little event.
It was around noonish - my son and I were sitting at the counter in the kitchen, talking, drinking coffee, getting kind of caught up (for him) on what's happened around home, around town, etc., while he's been out on the road for the past 5 days.
I happened to glance down at the middle of the kitchen floor and it looks wet to me so I ask him if it looks like something wet has been spilled on the floor there. He says yeah, looks that way to him and I remark that at least it's not yellow so we know it's not cat whiz then. (Gracie, our poor old cat, has developed a nasty habit recently of whizzing on the kitchen floor, right smack dab in front of the doggone sink, no less! Very annoying too it is since she tends to do that in the wee (no pun intended) hours of the morning shortly before the son-in-law gets up to make coffee and he generally is the one who steps in it, of course. Sometimes she catches me though too if I am just going to bed around 5 or 6 a.m. and decide to be a nice mother-in-law and make coffee so it's all ready for Bill when he staggers downstairs.)
So I grab some paper towels and wipe this -whatever it is - up and as I was wiping it up, my son mentions that it kind of smells like some kind of floor cleaner or some such. I told him that Mandy had just mopped up both the living room and dining room floors though before she left for work so the whole downstairs smells like lemon pinesol or some thing like that.
I sit back down at the counter and we pick up our conversation again and about that time, Miss Maya comes out and decides she is going to get into the cupboards and starts with the one where we keep the potatoes, onions and cat food. I really am not in the mood to be retrieving potatoes or onions from under the radiator or cat food (dry stuff) from all over the floor so I get after her to get the heck out of that cupboard. And, surprise, surprise, she listens. And, I'm all proud of myself that apparently the stern sound in my voice caught her attention or -well, whatever.
Just as I lift my coffee cup to take a sip though, out of the corner of my eye, I see a quick movement and before I can set the cup down and move a muscle, Maya has the cupboard under the sink open, is standing there with a spray-type container of some cleaner substance like 409 or along those lines and quick as a wink, she's gleefully squirting it all over the danged floor!
Uncle Clate starts laughing too - I even had to chuckle and I said to him, "Well, now we know what the wet substance was that was on the floor!"
And we decided that perhaps we should rename Maya - change her name to "Hazel" -which was my Mom's name and my Mom was a cleanaholic, if ever there was one. Seems that Mom's housecleaning genes may have bypassed me completely, dusted lightly on my girls and have landed full force in Maya. She loves to take the wet ones -moistened towelettes from under the baby's changing table and is happy as a pig in doo-doo then going all over the house wiping down windowsills, the tv screen - anything she can reach. The only other thing I've seen her do that gives her more pleasure than that is when she is busy with her crayons - coloring the walls, the windows, the tv screen. Right now, the marks still on the tv screen are so nicely placed that sometimes, in a certain light, they seem to line up perfectly at about where the actors faces are on the screen - just above the lips - so it looks like almost everyone- male or female - has a nice thin mustache there too now!
But, I think back too when my son was about Maya's age to a stunt he pulled on me one morning while I was back cleaning the bedrooms. He was supposed to be watching Sesame Street - which was usually a guaranteed program to keep his attention, keep him out of things if I was busy elsewhere in the house. I was running the vacuum and realized I heard no giggles, no noise of anytype coming from the living room so, as most any parent will agree, this is generally a bad sign!
I went out to check on him and he had migrated to the kitchen to the cupboard where I stored the cold cereal and had taken every single box of cereal out, dumped each and every one into a pile on the floor. Then he had emptied the oatmeal box on that pile and for good measure, had poured a bottle of pancake syrup over top of the whole mess.
Actually, his real grand finale there was that he also walked through that sticky pile. He was still dressed in his flannel pajamas and there he stood, with all this oatmeal sticking to his pant legs, looking just like he'd been tarred and feathered. Which, by the way, is exactly what I wanted to do to him too!
So, Maya's little playing around today was not nearly as difficult to clean up - actually was kind of helpful in a way as I wiped up the kitchen floor a bit more then using the stuff she had sprayed around there.
About 2:30 or so, after feeding Kurtis, he developed a severe odor so I took him into the bathroom to change him. In doing so, I discovered there had been a little bit of leakage around the snap area of his onesie so I had to undress him completely to remove that clothing item and when I redressed him, I didn't have a clean onesie handy to put back on him so I just put his tee shirt back on along with the pamper and put him in his playpen. And, I went out to the kitchen to mix up the bread I was baking today. After getting it all mixed up and ready to set it on one of the big living room radiators, all wrapped in tea towels and a big blanket to help it raise, as I passed his playpen, I noticed something was missing there. He still had the shirt on but had done an excellent job of removing the tabs on the pamper and was sitting there, bare butt, kicking away, flapping his little hands and chortling over and over with his little you know what just a flapping away with each movement too!
Hmmmm. This kid, I was thinking, as I took him back to the bathroom to put the pamper (which was still clean and dry) back on him must really take after his mother AND his Uncle Clate because they both, at about that age, had some very bad habits that really used to drive me bonkers. My son, if you put him in a playpen or his crib and didn't put pajama bottoms or jeans or shorts - something over the pamper -and if he made a nice mess in it, he would dig it out and finger paint with it -all over the playpen or the crib mattress, rails, the walls, you name it! Kurtis' mother was even worse though - she would completely strip regardless of how many layers of clothes you had on her and then, dip into the matter and finger paint!
So, by comparison you see, the grandson's actions, though somewhat similar to his mother's and his uncles, were just cute and humorous - as are almost all actions done by grandchildren though, aren't they!
We do, when we become grandparents, forgive a whole raft of things the kids do that if their parent, or sibling of the parent had done the same thing, they'd have been nursing a sore fanny for a while. As my son keeps telling Katie, the 15-year-old as he points to me, "Be very glad because THAT is not the same person that I grew up with!" And he's right because in so many ways, I am much, much more mellow than I was way back when my kids were little!
Maybe Bill Cosby is right when he warns children about grandparents that we are all just old people trying to be nice so we can get into heaven!
Or maybe it is that my neighbor up the street, my friend Shirley likes to say "If I'd know grandchildren were so darned much fun, I'd have had them first!" And boy, do I ever agree with that as they really are so much more fun than the "first edition!"
Now, I'm REALLY going to bed and hopefully, to sleep this time!
Nite all!