oh the mischief

My goodness Dennis was busy today. He had a lot of things on his personal agenda (many of which conflicted with ours) and he meant to accomplish all of them. Despite the work we're doing on the house to make it safer for him and nicer for our guests, every time we turned around today he had a grip on something dangerous. While I was cooking, he walked to the knife drawer, opened it, and pulled out the longest, scariest knife in the bunch. He held in up in a kind of awe and walked toward me with it clasped in front of him. He looked like Chucky.

David has been reorganizing his tools, and Dennis keeps escaping with tools. He gutted a filing cabinet and took the metal apparatus from inside and ran with it. We found it later by the front door. He swiped the broom from the kitchen, and if I hadn't been right there to catch the stuff, he would have cleared the kitchen counter of all dishes with the broom while he was on his way to the other areas of the house with it. He must have grown an inch last night because the pens that were on the table were safely out of his reach yesterday. Not so today, and I found myself running through the house after him twice trying to get the pens before he wrote on our freshly painted walls.

I heard a terrible scraping noise in the living room (where the hardwood floor is) and went running to find him pushing the nativity set stable across the floor. I asked him what he was doing. He replied "boat" and kept navigating the stable through the oceans of our living room. I didn't know quite how to reply to that.

He opened cabinets, grabbed the cat food and tried to open the bag for a snack, opened drawers, and chased the dog all over the house while yelling at the top of his lungs. He was certainly entertaining, enough so that he was retired to his room a little early tonight to watch a movie before bed. And if we weren't still so busy putting stuff away, we might have celebrated his confinement with an adult beverage. Perhaps I should not have been so generous in sharing the chocolate teacakes that Mom baked for me yesterday with Dennis. The chocolate went right to his mischief gene and clicked it into overdrive.