I Thought We Were Past This Stage...

But we're not. Abbey the destroyer has decided to come out of her hibernation and continue the chaos. Usually she's a pretty good kid. Cute, even. I mean, if you saw this picture of her you would hardly believe what she's capable of.

Ohhh... isn't she cute? Look at her trying so hard to give me a grown-up smile? Uh-huh. She's a pretty tricky trickster. Here are a couple of examples for you:
A)When your kids are really little and it's bath time you spend every second in there with them. You make sure they're washed and then you sit on the floor next to the tub or over on the, ahem, "seat" and giggle while they play and splash in the water. You're totally enamored with your offspring and are sure that they'll always be this cute. Then they get a little older and you sneak out of the bathroom every once in awhile to answer the phone or, if you have other children, act as referee to one of their brawls. Finally you reach the point of being okay with making sure they're washed and then just letting them have their own time with the water to play. As long as they make sure that any water splashed onto the floor gets cleaned up, you're as cool as a cucumber. Well the destroyer was in the tub Saturday night. (because "Saturday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Suuunnnndaaayyy!!!"...sorry, if you're not or have never been in primary you won't get that one.)Anyway. She was in the tub playing and I went in after about 20 minutes to get her out and there were bubbles. B.U.B.B.L.E.S.!!! Why am I so upset? Because I didn't put those bubbles in. She had emptied a brand new bottle of shampoo into the tub because she wanted bubbles. She wasn't very happy with me when I let all of her precious bubbles out and then made her stand up and take a shower to rinse them all off of her. In fact, I think we're still in that weird place people go to after they get into a fight. Plus she didn't get dessert that night and I think she's actually more upset about that than the bubbles going away.
B) When you belong to the Mormon church you go to a lot of meetings. A lot of those meetings occur on Sundays. I'm not an exception to this rule but have convinced my other meeting goers that it would be infinitely more comfortable to sit on my couches than on hard, cold metal chairs at the church. Luckily for me, they agreed. So we were having our little meeting yesterday and things seemed to be going quite smoothly - I was even prepared to give the hubby a "thank you" high-five later on for helping out with the kids. After people had left we sat down and were talking and Abbey the destroyer walked into the room. She had red rimmed eyes and was hanging her head in shame. I asked her what was wrong and Jeff just said, "You don't want to know." I told him that I so DID want to know. He said that Abbey had put stickers on the wall. With Elmer's glue. He assured me that the oldest monkey had cleaned it up...we'll see. I fully expect that when I go to move the couch in a week or two (or a month) I'll find a random heart or star sticker cemented in place with half a bottle of Elmer's.
Yep, having the destroying angel living with you certainly keeps you on your toes. At least we've moved past the time when she was spraying the house with Pam... that sucked.