The King

As you know, the Butterbean is a handful. He goes from place to place taking things out and redistributing them throughout the house. He is adept at opening doors, drawers and complicated contraptions. At this point I have 4 muffin tins on my kitchen floor, and can only find one potholder. Such is life with him.

Last week our playgroup was going to the play place at Burger King. Normally, I avoid those places, because they are big old germ factories, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Cabin Fever can drive you to do some crazy things!

Let me describe the scene for you (in 600 words or fewer). This is a fancy Burger King complete with a fireplace! So you walk in the front door to BK and you are in a vestibule where straight ahead is the whole fancy BK and to the left is a glass door to the play area. We should have turned around at this point, but I've never been one to do the right thing.

{For your knowledge, I use the word vestiblule to mean the area in between two doors when you are walking into a public place. You know the "no man's land" in between the 2 doors? I call that part the vestibule. Don't know if it is correct, but that's the word I use}

For whatever reason they were replacing the tile floor on the other side of the kids area, so they had a jackhammer going. Lots of dust, noise and crazy kids. As you know, I may or may not, have already been teetering on some mental health issues. The jackhammering didn't help.

We get there and Jackson and his friends took off and began their playing. The structure there is pretty big (and dirty too!), so Miller just kind of hung around the bottom. Eventually he tried to escape, but I caught him and brought him back to the play area. I made sure I closed the door behind me so he couldn't sneak out again. I was pretty vigilant about watching him too. Until I wasn't.

See it all went like this. I saw one of the other boys, who had previously been wearing pants coming out of the play structure with no pants. I called to his mom that there was a little problem and may or may not have giggled a little bit. That giggling stopped when that little boy told me that Jackson had pulled them off of him. Jackson. My Jackson.

At that point my mental health took a tiny turn for the worse. Eventually the guilty party came out with the other boy's pants and gave an explanation that was a lot more innocent than I thought. He just wanted the boy to come with him, so he was pulling him by the pants, and inadvertently pulled the pants off the kid. Still embarrassing, but at least he didn't mean to.

Still there was a full on fit when I told him he needed a time out. It would have been nice if the jackhammer was working just then, but alas it was on a little break. So everyone was treated to his full on fit while in time out.

Whew! About the time I was calming down from all this, I looked up to see a Burger King employee walking in with my baby. Um, see I didn't even know he was missing. I was too ashamed to ask where he had been. It couldn't be good. Was he outside? Was he in the kitchen? Was he playing in a mop bucket? Only he and a BK worker know, but I DID know that I was D.O.N.E. DUN!

Jackson was still having a fit and was not being very helpful as I was trying to put his coat and shoes on, so I asked my friend Lise to watch Miller, while I manhandled that 3 and half year old. She is always such a good sport to help those of us who have more children than we can handle. I love her for this.

So after I won the wrestling match with Jackson, I was ready to move on to Miller. I looked over and Lise was standing at the glass door leading to the vestibule making sure that Miller didn't escape again. Miller was near the door, waiting for her to lapse attention, but Lise was ON IT. No child would escape on her watch.

By the time I walked the 12 or so feet over to the door to get Miller he was already outside the door in the vestibule! What? how? what? I mean he is wily, but he is not Houdini--or is he? Turns out, he is not. We looked at the door and sure enough the glass that surrounds the door was missing, so he was just walking right through. Ah-ha, he found the flaw in the system and he was working it!

I knew I needed to high tail it out of there before Child Protective Services made an appearance.

And that is how I was conquered by The King.