Sometimes toddlers are exhausting for unexpected reasons

No time for exercise? Here's a great phrase to get your heart pumping at a nicely aerobic rate:

"I can't find the other 11 eggs."

!!!!

It appears that I forgot to latch the gate when I left K's room after saying good night tonight. We first realized this when we heard her walking around upstairs. I don't know why hearing that doesn't have us immediately running up the stairs, given our experiences in this area. But we're both sick, so our reaction time is off.

So B went upstairs, then quickly called me up for help. K met me at the top of the stairs, wearing only a diaper. From the smell, that was a good thing because she had clearly pooped. And then B showed me the previously untouched egg carton with one lonely egg sitting in it. We both burst out laughing, because really, what else can you do in a situation like that?

Not since the day last fall when K came out of her bedroom sans diaper with poop on her hands have I felt more apprehensive about having to go look for a mess. There wasn't anything obvious in the kitchen or dining room, so I went back to her bedroom. Thankfully, the eggs were sitting in a cluster on a cushion on her floor. There was one on the floor that was cracked but unbroken, but that was the extent of the mess.

There was the collateral damage to clean up. The poopy diaper, of course. It appears the reason she took her jammies off is she managed to get the top off of her straw cup of water, which meant new jammies and a new sheet for her bed. Removal of the two tubs of Play-doh that she had somehow managed to get her hands on, which has a frightening potential for caking most of the room with a mess that could only be cleaned up with hours of scraping. Chalk that up as another disaster avoided.

K is back in bed, the gate safely latched. And B has installed the refrigerator lock that I had bought after the last disaster but not gotten on because we had finally gotten a gate up that she couldn't get around. Ha.

*****

After 5 1/2 years living in thoroughly red Indiana, it is an extremely novel experience living in a state where our votes could very well tip the balance in the Democratic primary race, especially since we had assumed that our primary would hardly matter at all. In 2004, nobody in the national race cared about us or bothered to campaign in our state. We were either a sure thing or a lost cause, and certainly not worth courting. Do I sound bitter? Well, it made for a very quiet election season and I didn't miss the political robo-calls. But it would have been nice if our party had at least pretended to care about us a little.

But this year, not only does our state matter, we're exactly the demographic they want. B answered a phone survey for Quinnipiac University last night, which means his opinion will be part of the closely followed polls released next week. I'm sure in a week or two I'll be utterly sick of the thick carpet-bomb of political ads and incessant pleading phone calls (I'm already screening the phone pretty closely), but right now, it's kind of nice to be wanted.