Highlights of 2008 - Misadventures of a 2 yr old boy

One of the great memories of this year will definitely be cleaning, lots and lots of cleaning. Cleaning toothpaste out of the carpet, cleaning a vaseline-coated stuffed monkey, cleaning baby powder out the bed at 10pm, cleaning marker out of the curtains . . . I could go on and on. Yes, this has been the year of exploring for Cody. It is cute to say that my kid's favorite thing to do is to make a mess, but it is quite another to have to clean it up. It's a good thing I am not a fussy housekeeper - I do not make my kids eat in the kitchen, there are pen and crayon circles on several walls in my house, and when my kids spill, I generally just tell them to get a towel and we move on. But right after I had Colton, I started to wonder if I would ever be able to leave Cody in a room alone without coming back to a little (or big) surprise. Some of his favorites included rinsing my wall with an entire bottle of spray and wash, cleaning the infant carseat with toothpaste, putting lotion all over his body (without bothering to take his church clothes off first), feeding salt to all of my plants and any other surface where it might look cool, putting a sandwich in his bed to "save it for later", dumping entire boxes of cereal onto the pantry floor, seeing how bum cream tastes and then deciding it was better rubbed on the skin and clothes, washing his hair with the water from the fish tank, and . . . I'm pretty sure I blocked the rest out. It's been fun, but I do hope we are out of that stage (at least until Colton starts discovering fun things too).