We had an incident.

On Tuesday night I put Mark to bed later than usual because around dinner time he decided to take a two hour nap and I didn’t wake up until around 8:00 p.m. despite my efforts to arouse him. I knew it would take him a while to go to sleep. About 45 minutes after I put Mark in bed he came downstairs crying. He kept talking about a book that Brian read. I realized he was talking about the book “I am legend.” Rick read it over the weekend and on Sunday gave it to Brian to read. (Big surprise Brian left it at our house) As you can see from the picture the book has a scary cover.


Mark, who never misses a thing, had taken a close look at the cover of the book sometime during the weekend and was apparently thinking about it while trying to go to sleep. He was so upset by the book he was physically shaking when he came downstairs, and kept calling it a bad book, and saying “Daddy bought a bad book at Borders.” Rick and I decided the only way to calm him down was to throw the book away. I had Mark help me put the book in the trash can and I assumed that would be the end of it. Wishful thinking on my part. When I took Mark back to his room I explained to him that on Thursday the trash man would come and take the book and bury it in a big hole. He liked this idea, but kept repeating over and over again that it was a bad book and the trash man needed to bury it in a hole. After about 10 minutes he calmed down and tucked him in bed. Then I heard wailing again. I had to repeat the trash solution several times. Finally in order to get his mind off the book I bribed him with watching a Thomas movie, which did the trick. All day on Wednesday he told everyone we saw that his daddy bought a bad book Borders and the trash man was going to bury the book in a hole. I can only imagine what the neighbors must think……

FYI: Rick says book is depressing, don’t buy it or read it. Movie was not that great either.

Most irrational temper tantrum of the day: When I woke up on Wednesday morning the forecast was rain, and the skies looked threatening. The kids had left a bunch of toys scattered throughout the yard and I thought I had better put them away before it rained. One of the toys was Mark’s big wheel. When I came inside the house he was upset that I had put his big wheel in the shed. I explained to him that it was going to rain and we did not want it to get wet. He proceeded to pitch a fit, as in screaming, yelling and crying, about the rain for the next 10 minutes. He repeatedly said “I don’t want it to rain, make the rain stop, I want it to be sunny.” Note to self: Put learn to control weather on to do list.