Boys' Morning In

J was at work today, and I had the boys to myself. Here were the highlights and lowlights:

I cleaned Owen's room from top to bottom, and he insisted on wearing nothing but a diaper all morning. At one point I found his Halloween costume (a tiger suit) in his closet, and he decided he wanted to wear that for a bit. He knocked on James' door and roared at him--it is polite to knock before you roar, if you're a tiger--and wore it for about a half an hour before he decided he was tired of it and wanted to go back to the diaper.

I let James stay up during nap since it was going to be abbreviated anyway and offered him half of a chocolate cupcake while we worked on his states puzzle during afternoon coffee. When a large chunk of my half fell out onto the table he quickly grabbed it out from under me and popped it into his mouth, then immediately looked up at me and held eye contact as if wondering whether or not I'd seen it.

I fixed our increasingly inefficient vacuum cleaner by unclogging a brick of old cheerios and Christmas tree needles. I had the manual pulled up on my phone as I took it apart, and at one point Owen got ahold of the phone and made off with it. By the time I found him I was signed up to receive text notifications whenever the Bissell Corporation tweets anything.

I managed to bribe Owen into eating five bites of cut up orange pepper by offering him a small dish of strawberries and whipped cream for lunch. Once he finished the strawberries and still had some whipped cream, he finished all of the other orange pepper slices, dipping each one into the whipped cream.