It's time for the adventures of....

1) {Last update I made about Roman's ears, I had mentioned that he was still suffering from ear infections and that he was still waking up not only several times a night, but early, too. I think the ear infection and lack of sleep went hand-in-hand, but we'll see.... Roman got tubes in his ears yesterday. Cross your fingers that he starts sleeping through the night now.}

Well Roman isn't the only one who has been sick. Both Jason and I have had upper respiratory infections and have been very tired and not very easy to rise in the morning. When Roman comes into our room usually we're still in semi-conscious la-la land. So combine our sluggishness & Roman's alertness before 6:00 am and you get...

• olive oil poured all over the kitchen counters & floor, topped off with a little salt & pepper. Perfect toppings for foccacia... not so fun to clean up.
• unwrapped and half-licked lollipops stuck to the counter
• the {supposedly child-locked} drawer of office supplies ransacked and staples, thumbtacks & rubber bands scattered throughout the basement carpet {all done while Roman was bare-foot, I may add}
• the good Spiegelau wine glasses that were soaking in the sink... well thankfully nothing happened to them, but I found Roman had pushed his chair over to the sink and was pouring water from one wine glass to the other, to the other, to the other...
• 1/2 of the bottle of Dawn dish soap poured into the sink & counter
• whole box of cereal dumped into the dog's dishes {dogs were still in bed asleep with us}

And this stuff happens during nap, too! One afternoon, Roman woke up after 20 minutes and I changed him and laid him back down and laid on the carpet next to him to emphasize that it was still nap-time and that he needed to try and go back to sleep. Yada yada yada... I woke up a half-hour later and Roman was sitting indian-style next to me with a bag of cookies. Who knows how long he had roamed the house - probably for the full 30 minutes!

2) So Roman isn't a fan of Santa Claus as you can see by the post on 12/12. But he loves talking about him.

• Mommy: "Roman, where does Santa come from?" Roman: "fire"
  
• Mommy: "No - Santa comes from the North Pole. He comes into our house through the fireplace. What does he bring?" Roman: "cookies"
• Mommy: "No - he eats cookies. What does be bring?" Roman: "boots"
• Mommy: "No - they're not called 'boots', they're called 'stockings', I know they look like boots. Santa brings gifts. And he puts gifts in the stockings. How does Santa get here?" Roman: "car"
• Mommy: "No - he rides on a sleigh - it's like a sled. The reindeer pull it and they fly through the air." Roman: {puzzled look and off he goes to do something naughty}

Every time the doorbell rings, though, Roman thinks it is Santa.

3) When Roman went to get the tubes put in his ears, we had to wake him up early {I know! Big shock to us, too, that we did the waking up!} He got to wear his pj's and bring a "friend" per the instructions from the hospital. Well Roman hasn't shown any particular preference to any certain stuffed animal, so I grabbed his stuffed chicken, Mr. CluckCluck, and we headed out of his room. Roman isn't used to bringing his stuffed animals out of his room so he immediately went back and put Mr. CluckCluck back in bed. I told him that he could bring someone with him and asked him who he wanted to bring? {I love how he never asked the question: "where are we going?"} Roman looked at all of his stuffed animals and then said "Nico". I told him we couldn't take Nico with us {our 6-year old next-door neighbor} and that he needed to choose someone else. Well stupid me for not clarifying that it had to be an inanimate stuffed object in his bed... because he then wanted to bring Nico's older brother Junior. So he finally selected his Tiger {which was from Nico & Junior but I didn't want to get into the significance of that} and off we went. Wouldn't you know it... when it came time to have the surgery and the nurses took him away, he threw a tantrum because he didn't want to be separated from his mittens. So he had surgery with his mittens on!

4) Last week we had a new babysitter watch Roman while we went out. Poor girl: from the second she set foot into our house, it was a disaster. First she came early {who could fault that?} and we were cleaning up dog barf because we had previously pumped Casie's stomach {because she ate a tube of chapstick.} Well we thought she had done all that business outside but she came inside and did another pile. So strike 1 on us. Strike 2 was when I led her into Roman's room to show it to her and the stench of his... let's just call it a "not-so-solid BM" came wafting out. At that point I turned to her and said "Ah yes... I guess I should tell you that Roman has "the D-word" but he isn't sick - it is just from his anti-biotics. I just changed him about an hour ago so you shouldn't have any more problems with that. But just in case, I didn't want you to think he was sick." So while we're in his room and I'm showing her around, Roman disappears. When I went out into the hallway to look for him, Roman was hanging onto the bannister on the outside of our stairs! If you've ever been to our house, you'd know that we have an extra 2 inches of stair outside of the spindles. He had gone down the landing and took that outer part of the stairs back up and was suspended about 11 feet over the foyer. Strike 3. I knew that if I "freaked out" he could lose his grip on the bannister and fall, so I grabbed his forearms and pulled him over and I calmly told him to never do that again. That babysitter was probably thinking I had several screws loose for not reprimanding him more, but I didn't want to give him the reaction I know he was looking for. So as we left, I reminded her that as discussed previously on the phone, my sister Leah was coming into town that night and staying with us and was scheduled to arrive anywhere between 10 & 11 and she would take her home. {I had pre-paid her like Leah was coming at 11 instead of earlier}. So off we went to meet up with our group that was taking a limo 40 minutes south out to dinner, to see the Christmas lights and just have a night-on-the-town. Everyone else's babysitters were family who were spending the night or were older babysitters capable of staying out late, so knowing Leah would be at our house and would be there in the event Roman woke up early in the morning, eased our worries and so we were ready to party until 2 am {or later - whatever the group wanted to do}. Well as we pulled away, Leah called to say that they weren't coming in town after-all because their son got sick on in the car enroute and they had turned around to drive back to St. Louis. Suddenly I remembered that poor 14 year old sitting at our house, who was fully expecting to be in her own bed at 11:15. Strike 4. I called her and explained the situation and she said she was fine staying out that late. As I hung up with her I put myself in both her's and her mother's shoes and thought that wasn't cool and I immediately started thinking of other options to get home quicker. I had settled on just having the limo driver take me home after dinner and not going out when I remembered our friends Julie & Marc weren't taking the limo but were still meeting up with us all. So problem solved... I'd ride home with Julie around midnight and Marc would take my place in the limo. So at 12:15 when I called the babysitter to let her know I was almost home, she said "Oh Mrs. Lewis... Roman woke up a little bit ago covered in "D" and I'm trying to get him back to sleep." Yikes! Strike 5. I envisioned myself at age 14 having to deal with "D" and I would have either had the kid sitting in the bathtub with my own barf all around me because of my weak gag reflex, or I would have just left and never come back and insisted that my parents move away from that neighborhood so I'd never have to deal with that crazy family again. Instead, what I came home to was Roman dressed in different pj's, laying in a make-shift bed in the middle of his floor {because the sitter couldn't find a change of sheets because I don't keep them in the linen closet like normal people do} and she was reading to him and rubbing his back and trying to get his back to sleep. Well... I'm telling you this story because if you live in the Parkville area or in my neighborhood, this girl ROCKED and I totally recommend her to anyone. Let me know if you'd like her name. She was 14 going on 30 and was grace under fire. She always had a smile on her face - even through all 5 strikes {and it could have been more - those were the only 5 I knew about}. I slipped her some extra $$ for dealing with our craziness and Julie took her home while I worked on getting Roman back to sleep. The next morning Roman woke up asked where she was! He really liked her! I called her mother up and apologized if her daughter came home and said anything about the unusual circumstances and then told her how highly I thought of her daughter. I just thought that if I she was my daughter I'd want to know how she handled the situation. It isn't often that someone calls up to tell a mom a compliment - usually they get complaints.