Toddlers' Top Ten (with apologies to David Letterman)

TOP TEN WAYS TO SEND YOUR MOTHER TO AN EARLY GRAVE...OR AT LEAST A PADDED ROOM,

courtesy of my two-year-old:

10. Take a huge gob of peanut butter and smear it all over your face and into your ears, proclaiming "beautiful!"

9. Sneak food from the pantry and stuff it into hard to find crevices. At least, hard to find until the smell starts emanating from strange places.

8. Throw yourself over your toys when a friend and her child visit, saying "Mine, mine, mine."

7. Protest bedtime mightly, trying to convince mom and yourself that "It not night, it morning!!"

6. Get your sister's pot of purple sparkly lip gloss and smear it all over the mirror, the floors, and the television set.

5. Take said pot of lip gloss and eat it. The entire thing. In front of your mother. Just out of her reach while she's on the potty and trying vainly to wrestle it out of your little hands.

4. Take all of your carefully organized, folded clothes out of your dresser drawers and fling them everywhere. Then use the drawers as beds for your stuffed animals or a makeshift stepstool to get to the socks in the basket on top and fling them, parachute-style, into the foyer.

3. If you forget to protest bedtime mightly, do not despair! Make up for it in the middle of the night by pounding on your door and trying to convince everyone in the household that it's morning.

2. Stand on the side of the tub while mom has her back turned to get a towel out of the linen closet. Jump. Hit your head on the faucet (one of the small handles that they don't make covers for; not that it matters since you take protective covers off everything anyway) and scare aforementioned mother out of ten years of her life.

And, number one...

1. If you live somewhere where there is no snow, no worries! Take the pillow sham off your parents' bed and use it for a sled down their very long flight of stairs. Don't fret about stopping; the wall at the bottom will break your fall. Then you'll have a nice goose egg on the left side of your head to match the other one incurred by number two.


Repeat as necessary!

Coming soon: Driving mom crazy by expressing your artistic talents...