Air mail and other stuff....

Thursday. Oh, Thursday! We had a particularily bad 'gong show' - aka picking up Ethan from school - so, I sent both boys to seperate areas of the house for time-outs when we got home. It wasn't so much that their behaviour was worse than any other day, it was more that the usual agonizing 20 minutes of chasing them around trying to get Ethan to pack up his own bag turned into 35 minutes. That wasn't the bad part though. The bad part was that the whole thing came to a fantastic climax when Ethan - having found the act of holding up himself upright against gravity to be oh, so exhausting a task that he needed a bit of a break - laid down on the hallway floor. Whereupon Finny decided that the only reasonable thing to do was to assault Ethan by jump on his back and choking him by pulling on his hoodie. This resulted in Ethan screaming as loudly and ineffectively as he could, 'Get off Finn...I SAID GET OOFFFFF!!!!!' Which made me start yelling, 'That. Is. Enough. I SAID EEEEE-NUFFFF!!!' So I did the only thing left to do in a situation like this: I walked away. I also informed them that when we got home they were both going for a 15 minute time-out and that all complaining, whining, stomping of feet, crying, yelling, and cajolling would result in 5 extra minutes being added to their time outs. This worked miraculously well, indictating that I will never again have any luck what-so-ever with this approach. Part way through the time-out I heard Ethan open his door, followed by some rustling. Upon investigation, I found this in the hallway outside his closed door: Now, I don't know about you, but I was highly impressed with the level of manipulation going on here. He carefully made of picture of himself expressing his love for me (See the big smile on his face? See the carefully drawn heart between us? See the rather small, mean face and oddly mismatched hair on me? Yeah.) wrapped it lovingly around his suction cup arrow and shot it into the hall way with his dollar store bow as if to say 'Hey Mum, you're the best. Thanks for putting me in a time out. And even though I'm only 7, I can tell you did this only out of a deep sense of love and responsibility toward me." Riiiight. Seriously though, you have to give him props for trying. In other news, marshmellow people are big at our house right now. Both the boys are obsessed with marshmellows at all times, but they've taken their love of the common marshmellow to a new level. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the marshmellow-pretzel man: It's as if Finn is saying I love you little squishy pretzel guy, and now, I must eat you! I particularily love how both the boys always have that cheesy 'say cheese' smile on their faces whenever I get the camera out. Case in point? Ethan is showing off his feminine side at his school's mock olympic opening ceremonies - the blue babushka (say that three times fast) is for a 'scarf dance'. I must inform you there is nothing cuter than 6 and 7 year olds frolicking with scarves to music. Killer.