Beware The Small People

On Friday, Little Miss had a day off school (again, whee!), so we had a playdate. In fact, we sort of had two playdates, as we also invited a friend's son to join us since said friend broke her foot and is pretty much down for the count for awhile.

Picture me with three four year olds running amuck in my house for three hours. Two of the three were boys (because, after all, Little Miss has no interest in girls an only plays with boys now), and Little Miss plays like a boy anyway.

They were all pretty well behaved, but three children running around playing requires an active eye. One child had to go potty, so I showed him where the bathroom was and resumed monitoring the other two until he requested my help washing his hands. All was good.

A little while later, the same boy announced he had to go potty again, but this time he wanted no help. No worries. I kept playing with the other two children, and the little boy returned shortly thereafter.

At lunchtime, one boy's babysitter arrived to pick him up. We came up from the basement when we heard her, and she was in our foyer petting one of our cats. She asked if I knew that he'd been outside. In fact, he was sunning himself in our driveway when she pulled up and the car scared him.

Ummm, no. I didn't know that my indoor only cat was outside. I thought quickly and headed to the powder room, across the hall from my garage. Where the door was still standing wide open.

Of course the babysitter had found the ummm less intelligent of my two cats sitting in the middle of the driveway. After calling briefly for Roar (no grief on the names here, folks, Mister Man was only just three when he named Meow and Roar), I realized that he was outside, too.

Whee! Fortunately, he came running from the bushes to the side of my house once I called him, and he was redeposited inside, safe and sound.

Note to self: keep track of all small children and don't trust potty breaks.

After we ate lunch, I returned the little boy to my friend with the broken foot. She was in the process of trying to build and iceberg cake for said child's birthday party the next day, and she was requesting some assistance from me. She didn't believe me when I told her that I don't build or carve cakes for a reason, but between the two of us, we came up with some workable solutions.

While I was in the kitchen helping her figure this out (and racing into the basement to find a toy dinosaur I could wash and stick next to the cake before it fell over), Little Miss and her son were playing nicely in the other room. All was well.

I gathered up Little Miss when it was time for us to go, and luckily I didn't even need to ask Little Miss to put her coat on since she'd never taken it off for whatever reason. In fact, she even had put on her mittens.

We climbed into the car and began backing out of the driveway. I heard Little Miss shaking her mitten. Yep, I heard it. It jingled. In fact, it sounded rather like money. I sighed and pulled over, requesting to see the mitten.

Little Miss refused and pulled the mitten close to her chest. Fortunately, she quickly saw reason, and I began collecting the coins from Little Miss's mitten that she'd stolen from my friend. The only good news was that they were all pennies.

*sigh*

I decided against returning to the house and making my broken footed friend in the wheelchair let me in again, as we were fortunately going to see them again at the birthday party the next day. Instead, I placed the coins in my pocket with a mental note to return them.

Note to self: Little Miss doesn't get the value of money and apparently has no compunctions about taking them from other people. Have a little chat about thievery and respecting other people's property.

I'm feeling like a great trying-it-out-SAHM this week, can you tell?