Calgon ... PLEASE take me away!

I am certainly not going to survive this.  None of my other children were quite as TWO as Melanie.  She is going to be the end of me.  Yesterday, a rainy Sunday morning, we were all hunkered down, the kids watching cartoons, and I helping Christian with a project for school.  The doorbell rings ... and it is two women out walking their babies in strollers.  They say, "Is this your little girl?" pointing at Melanie who they had corralled down by the mailbox.  "We found her out in the street!"  Somehow she had managed to open the door and escort herself (and the dog) out into the wild blue yonder, without anyone noticing.  Of course I was totally embarrassed (knowing full well that these ladies were mumbling to themselves as they walked away, "Man, what kind of MOM is she???"  After securing Melanie in the house, I took off in the rain (and my pajamas) to rescue the dog, who had gone across the street to commune with the dog who lives there. 

Not ten minutes later, after Melanie had done her best Tasmanian Devil imitation through the house, I found her totally naked again, clothes nowhere to be found. 

The day had hardly began to wane, when I realized later that afternoon that I had lost track of Melanie yet again.  As I rounded the corner to yell upstairs, "IS ANYONE WATCHING MEL ... " I found her sitting on the stairs with three bottles of shampoo, happily squeezing the gooey liquid out on to the carpet, all the way from the top, down to the bottom.  What a pretty pattern it makes when you dribble it out!  We put our new Hoover steam-vac to work, but MAN does that shampoo foam up a lot!

But wait!  There's more!  Quentin had a sheet of poster board laid out on the floor for a project.  He had almost completed it, ran into the kitchen for quick second, and came back to find that Melanie (who moves at the speed of light) had taken a black magic marker and scribbled all over his hard work.  I'm sure at that moment he had decided NEVER to have children, ever ever.  We did manage to creatively cover up Melanie's "artwork" with pictures ...

Man oh man.  That's all I can say.  The only redeeming thing I can think of is that when she sleeps, she sleeps well.  Too bad I can't.