What can you do but laugh?

Today was totally uneventful and relatively peaceful all day......until everything went wrong for thirty minutes of pure chaos.  Then we were fine again.  It was so ridiculous the only thing to do is laugh.

The girls were sleeping, I was preparing dinner, Nicholas was helping Armando trim the hedges outside.  All was peaceful.

I heard the babies wake up, but they were happy in their cribs and I was cooking.  After a while, when I was wrist deep in beet juice, Lauren started screeching, so I went to get her out of her crib.  I left two pots on the stove and two things in the oven.

As soon as I walk in her room, Nicholas bursts through the front door with his bicycle, and begins riding it up and down the hall and around the kitchen island.  Lauren, meanwhile, is sitting in her crib with her hands full of feces.  Poop has been leaking out of her diaper the whole time she was sitting in here, and she took the opportunity to wipe it all around her crib and wall.  Oh yes.  Lovely.

As soon as I take her out of her crib to change her, Kate starts wailing in the next room.  Cacophony makes everything seem more urgent, wouldn't you say?  I have Nicholas singing at the top of his lungs, riding up and down the hall, bumping walls and thumping his feet.  Kate is screaming in the next room, and Lauren is starting to wail because I'm trying to clean the poop off of her.  She's so covered in poop I decide that a bath is a necessity.

I let naked Lauren run around while I go out to the yard to call Mando in for back-up.  Put Lauren in the bath, Kate is also poopy.  Mando takes over bath duty, I change Kate's diaper (also leaking poop).  Put naked Kate in bath with Lou who refuses to get out, go change poop covered crib bedding.  Finish with poop bedding and walk into the hallway with arms full of poopy clothes only to find my 3 year old riding his bike with a KNIFE.  My very sharp santoku knife is being pointed directly at me by a 3 year old on a bike, coming straight down the hallway toward me.  Very unsettling.  Arms full!  Drop laundry, calmly grab knife (so as not to startle or scare Nicholas--- when he gets scared he shuts down and stops listening to me).  Then I look over at the cutting board and realize that he's also been chopping up a bar of soap.  (I am still amazed that there were no injuries!)

I explain to him the dangers of knives and very clearly set the rule that you never touch a knife unless Mommy or Daddy is right there with you (sometimes he helps me chop fruit).  Then I send him outside with a piece of the chopped up soap so he can scrape it with a stick.

Pick up poopy laundry and take it downstairs to the laundry room.  Meanwhile screaming ensues above due to the end of bath time.  (Oh, did I mention that Lauren peed on the floor in the thirty seconds between de-robing and getting in the bath?)  Start laundry and return upstairs to find Kate at the gate, waiting for me--poking her little arms and legs through the gate and whining, trying to get to me.  Nicholas has disappeared from the front stoop.  I throw on shoes and head outside to find him.

Once found, I instruct him to stay on front steps.  Go back inside to screaming Kate (because I turned my back on her to go outside....the nerve!) and smell dinner burning on the stove and in the oven.  Jump over gate, grab oven mitt, open oven and grab one thing with each hand.  Hands full of hot things, nowhere to put them on the stove, oven door open, Kate running full tilt toward oven.  Fling right left out to deflect running baby, she dodges and tries to come between legs.  Still searching for a place to put hot things in hands, use leg to kick baby aside (hey! better than burnt fingers!) which starts the screaming anew.  Dinner saved.  No burns for baby.

Pick up Kate, crying stops.  Realize that peace has returned.  Not a sound in the house, everyone is happy.

30 minutes of panic and then peace.