This past Thursday I went to my sister's house to watch her three kids while she took her husband to the hospital to have knee surgery. 

That's right.  I was a babysitter.  Stop laughing.  My sister tried to prepare me ahead of time about how my one year old niece Lucy is so unlike her big brothers and just gets into everything.  OK, I thought, I can do this.  I gave birth to Mr.-There-Ain't-No-Mountain-High-Enough.  What's one more?  I can handle 4 kids.  For heaven's sake, my mother did it.

As I walked into her living room, she apologized again for how "difficult" Lucy would be and how she is just "into everything.

There, across from me on the couch, were 19 neat little piles of folded laundry and Lucy was perched in the middle of the floor watching Dora.

His feet barely hit the ground before The Boy was in a dead run for the piles of laundry.  I vaulted over the ottoman and beat him there.  I frantically scooped up the piles and threw them into a laundry basket.  I turned around to find Lucy was still staring at Dora.  The Boy quickly flipped around and ran over to try to put his fingers into the menacing looking fan running in the corner.  When he couldn't get his fingers in far enough to chop the ends off, he bent over, unplugged the fan and then tried to plug it in again. 

Scan back to Lucy, now playing quietly on the floor with her toys. 

The Boy flew across the room and cleared the picture frames off the window sills with one long sweep of his anarchial little arm. 

You guess it.  Lucy was still playing with her toys. 

At at least one point of the next 36 hours, I observed the following:

1. Ethan clearing a bookshelf at toddler level (which shocked his 3 1/2 year old cousin Jack, who said that no one was allowed to touch the books and ever HAD touched the books)
2. Ethan clearing a bookshelf that was 4 feet above the kitchen table.  He wanted to see the pretty vase perched on top of the books.
3. Ethan reprogramming the computer so that his older cousins needed to know Russian in order to figure out how to move their video game characters.
4. Ethan freeing Uncle Jorgie's "car-car" from the top shelf above the computer desk.
5. Ethan removing everything from the lower two shelves of the fridge.
6. Ethan climbing up on the couch and over the wall, lowering himself slowly into the high chair that was up against the other side of the wall in the kitchen.
7. Ethan taking all the toys from the closet, carrying them down the hall, around the corner, into the living room and creating a pile in the middle of the floor (in the 2 minutes I went to the bathroom).
8. Ethan taking all the dirty laundry piled on the floor and repositioning it in the center of the kitchen floor.
9. Ethan taking all the chemicals from under the sink and putting them beside the pile of laundry in the center of the kitchen floor.
10. Ethan finding bags of pretzels in the dining room in a box and excitedly yelling "BWA."  Like please is necessary when you have conducted a successful pretzel search-and-rescue mission.
11. Ethan taking a banana off the counter, because, well, I don't know WHY THE HELL he took the banana off the counter.
12. Ethan running around the house with a banana peel that he liberated from the trash can.
13. Ethan running around the house with a PIZZA BOX that he liberated from the trash can.
14. Ethan running around the house with a DIAPER that he liberated from the trash can.
    

Lucy--you got it--watching DORA THE EXPLORER like a good little girl.  Into everything, my ass.

Before you send a comment my way about leaving my child unattended, I am an idiot.  God forbid I turn my back for more than 30 seconds at a time because that's all he got and look what happened. 

My sister left me half-page instructions on how to get to my nephew's school to pick him up (turn right and the school is down the street on the left" would have sufficed) but no directions on how to get the effing DVD player in the TRUCK to work.  It was 19 minutes and to my nephew's credit, he whined about it for all 19 minutes.  I should have asked him for help.  It is 2006 and he is 3 1/2.  He could probably rewire the damn thing if you gave him a screw driver.  By the time I was done, he was asleep.  He was asleep.  In fact, the only one awake was The Boy.  Because who would have thought there could be TV IN THE CAR?  He laughed, he cried, he thought it was better than CATS.

A lot worser things happened (I took the kids out half naked because it was hot, but that really doesn't justify them not wearing clothing--in retrospect, of course) but I won't bore you any further. 

The next one SO better be like Cousin Lucy.  That's all I'm gonna say.