Somebody find me an exorcist!!!!

I got up like a good girl yesterday morning and decided to go to the gym for an hour but Caeligh and James were being a bit of a handful and I thought I'd suggest to Dougie that he take them to the local indoor playcentre which is - conveniently - right next to my gym. So he went off to read his paper and let the kids play while I did my thing - 25 minutes on the Crosstrainer of Death!!!! Plus I learned the last few exercises in my weights routine (the leg press is a killer and so is the shoulder press - I'm guessing I don't use the muscles needed for them very much!!!). So I finished up but James was whinging that he didn't want to leave the play centre and Caeligh was just gearing up for hissy fit mode. In a brave move we decided to take them across to the shops at Forest Lake to have a quick look around and pick up some fruit and veg. The second the pram came out of the car Caeligh started screaming. She is one of these kids that hates being restrained though thankfully now she's old enough to reason with and we usually make a deal that if she will sit in the pram then we won't strap her in. It always ends in her making an escape but we at least have to try!!! The reason she needs to still be in a pram at age 3 is that she is one of these kids who gets into the shops and just goes bug crazy....she starts running around touching stuff, picking up breakables (and her history with breakables isn't very good), bolting from place to place and hiding under clothes racks for fun. Basically she's a pain because she will not walk and hold anyone's hand, she will not even just walk beside you. She has to dash from place to place with nobody controlling her in order for her to enjoy a visit to the shops. Naturally that doesn't quite work for us so we at least try to get her to sit in the pram for the better part of the trip if we can. The straps are a bit pointless anyway. She has a Houdini streak that lets her contort her way out of any kind of harness. We've never owned a pram (and honestly we've had about seven now!!!) that she couldn't get herself out of!!!! So she climbs out within 5 minutes of arriving at the shops while Daddy stops to look at something and she's off. She tells us she'll walk like a good girl and then starts pulling down toys and playing with them, picking up delicate vases from a low shelf (who was the genius who thought to put them there???), and basically wants to run about like a lunatic doing whatever she wants. So Daddy has no patience for this and we chalk it up to yet another failed attempt at taking her to the shops and having her behave for us. She knows the consequences of running about like an idiot are that she will end up right back in the pram and this time Daddy does strap her in but not before she starts screaming like we're axe murdering her in the aisle of the shop, that real choking, gagging, foaming at the mouth carry on from a true professional as Daddy and I both try to wrestle her into her pram again and get straps on her. THEN in what she thought would be a clever and attention getting move she starts screaming that we're hurting her!!!!! Honestly I wish I could have crawled under a clothes rack myself by that time!!!!!! She's not hurt, she's just damned angry that she's going back in her pram. So basically she screams her head off for the rest of the now shortened trip and Doug and I just look at each other and wonder what on earth we're going to do with her. Oh yeah, and the Forest Lake perfect mummies are giving us the hairy eyeball by now too - yep ladies keep on lookin', she's a 100% genuine ratbag and you guys probably couldn't handle her for an hour let alone full time!!!!! James though was pretty good and wanted a new zip up jacket for winter (little clothes horse he's becoming!) and it took me ten minute to talk him out of the $60 Billabong one he saw in the surf shop and convince him that the $12 one in Best and Less was in fact seriously way cooler than the other one as it matched his new trackpants.

We get them home and Caeligh, while probably tired by now, is undefeated and she sets about showing us exactly what happens when we piss her off at the shops. She makes up for it in spades at home! I was trying to get some typing done and Daddy was downstairs putting on washing so she decided to fill the mop bucket and mop the bathroom, nice except that there were still clothes on the floor and I always like to sweep or vacuum first cos you know how the floor has gross stuff like hair and dirt etc that only gets spread around if you mop first??? So I ended up having to clean the bathroom anyway as she mopped the toilet and the bathub as well.......She went on to break a kitchen chair, break a decorative candle she found ON TOP of the entertainment unit AGAIN, found another screwdriver and had a go at Daddy's computer monitor and as soon as I got her off the chair she found a second screwdriver and started gouging the timber coffee table (I have so given up on having a nice coffee table until she's moved out of home!), she climbed on the timber shifter arm for Daddy's racing wheel and tried to snap it off, she climbed on top of my bedroom wardrobe, fed the fish again with the whole jar of food (and I can't remember how many times I've told Lachie not to leave it within her reach!), she pulled down the curtains in her room, tried to pull down the curtains in the loungeroom, threw the Saturday paper ALL OVER the loungeroom floor, made three separate bowls of breakfast and proceeded to spill at least some of each on the floor and the table, spilled the sugar all over the table whilst getting said breakfast, went into the fridge and opened the vegetable crisper where she proceeded to snap in half every zucchini in the bag and break up the mushrooms which she then said she was actually trying to peel and to cap it all off she had a poo accident in her pants and tried to clean up herself. The end result was poo on the toilet, the floor, the bathroom sink as she tried to use three separate cleaning cloths, two clean towels and a roll of kitchen paper to clean up. It also ended up smeared on the floor and the vanity cupboard, the door and her almost entire lower half. I walked in and just wanted to cry......Doug stood in the doorway and laughed his ass off!!!!!!! I told him if he thought it was so funny he could clean it so he did! All these dramas happen in about little 30 second gaps when you think she doesn't have enough time to get up to such mischief. Normal kids you worry about after five minutes or so - not her, thirty seconds to disaster!!!!!! She's doing my head in but I love her so much - it's really hard!

So that was my Saturday! Went to the gym again this morning and now I'm going to sit down to an omlette for lunch courtesy again of the wonderful Dougie. The kids went to Grans for a sleepover last night - kind of forced them to go actually - and they'll be back soon so I'll read the paper in peace for a few minutes before they come home and we see what other disasters we will end up dealing with!

Love to ya girls!!!!