Job training

Periodically my wife gives me the opportunity to "try" her job, albeit in bite-sized samples. This weekend, out of necessity, my wife took the older girls to a wedding while I remained home with los tres diabolitos...I mean little ones. To make the experience more rewarding for me, she ordered up some nasty weather to insure lots of quality indoor time together.

Having enjoyed many such opportunities to learn my wife's job, I am under no illusions that it is easy, and those of you who read this surely have the sense that I am a little goofy...but today has been a bit out of the ordinary.

To set the stage, you need to know that by mutual decision, and with advise and counsel of the children (ok so we are also lazy, but humor me) we have left the arificial Christmas tree in place in the living room and plan to leave it there semi-permanently. The answer to why we chose to do this probably requires professional help to ascertain :-), but we did remove the decorations with the intent of decorating it for different holidays throughout the year.

So Gresham comes running into the bathroom - which I was using at the time - to tell me there was a bear in the tree. Now, we do live in the woods...sort of...and there have been occaisional little brown bears in the area, so my ears perked up a little. I said "which tree?", while trying to think through why a bear would not be hibernating right now. At this point Shaun joins us in the bathroom along with his sister, and all of them are chirping about the bear in the tree...in the living room! Now I was pretty certain we didn't have a bear in the house, but there was a hell of a lot of racket comming from the other room and when I entered, the Christmas tree was shaking. A loud shrill cry let me know the cat was caught in the light cords.

Now it is here I should tell you that I got a little bit of private enjoyment out of seeing the cat like this...she and I exist in a kind of "don't bother me, I wont bother you" way around the house, but I decided I should free her to spare the tree for another holiday season. Following her release the cat dissapeared and life got back to normal.

About an hour later after lunch, I managed to get 10 minutes to shower while the boys napped. As I was looking up to check for spiders (a different blog post - trust me), I stepped on something hard in the shower at almost the same time that shampoo began to run down my face making me close my eyes. As I was rinsing my hair it became clear that there were several small hard items in the shower...and when my eyes were rinsed the cat poop came into view.

While I can't prove it, I would swear that damn cat was sitting on the bathroom counter watching me have a conniption fit in the shower, and I do know for certain that all three children learned several new words to share with Mom on her return because on my wet soapy exit from the shower I was greeted by all three. Now I am off to the store for candy to buy their silence...anyone want a cat?