The beans were good, but dinner kinda sucked

Well, the casserole turned out pretty well last night. It certainly didn't look much better once it was finished:


but it did taste good. It was actually pretty amazing how much flavor there was, considering the short and simple ingredient list.

However getting a chance to eat it was another matter entirely. Our gym schedule causes us to have pretty late dinners, and usually Emily can't wait that long. She gets hungry while I'm still making dinner, so I have to scrape something together to feed her while I'm finishing dinner. This means that by the time Will and I sit down to a lovely meal, Emily is already fueled up and ready to go. As we try to sit and eat and have a conversation, Emily is walking around whining about one thing or another, periodically pausing near me to raise her arms up and say "Uh-ee?", which translates to "Up, please?". Some nights I give in and just hold her in my lap while I eat one-handed. After a long day, neither Will nor I are in the mood to listen to all the whining. Last night, Emily's issue was her shoes. She wanted me to take them off, and fool that I am, I obliged. The problem with taking any article of clothing off of Emily at night is that she will then demand to have the rest of her clothes taken off, all the way down to her necklace and even her hairbow. When night falls, it's naked time, and while it sometimes slips her mind, all it takes is the removal of a shoe or jacket to remind her.

It's good for kids to have naked time, and I absolutely love watching her dance around naked every night, but I do not love cleaning up her pee. We usually have about 15-30 min of pee-free naked time, so we try to have a diaper back on before our time is up. Last night though, almost as soon as I had removed her clothes for her and turned back to my dinner, she had peed on the floor, and by the time I got over to her, she had walked through it. As I cleaned up the puddle and footprints, Emily was busily unrolling the entire toilet paper roll in the powder room.

Once I had gotten all of that fixed, I returned to my dinner again, only to hear "Uh-ee?". I lifted her into my lap, and got in a few more bites before she peed all over me. Nasty. So then I went around and closed the blinds so that I could toss my urine-soaked pants into the washer and complete my meal partially clothed. I realized when I was putting leftovers in the fridge and I saw headlights sitting in front of the house across the street that I had forgotten to close the blinds on the other side of the house. I'm not used to having people close enough to see in my back windows, and I'm not used to having any windows at all on the sides of my house, and for that, I apologize to my neighbors.

Then it was time to give Emily her bath, but over the last week she has gone from a bath-loving kinda girl to a girl who runs from a bath like a rabid animal. Showers are fine though for some reason, even eagerly anticipated, so these days I have to shower while holding her. Let me tell you my friends, trying to shower while holding a soapy, slippery toddler is incredibly difficult.

SO. I had cleaned up a puddle of pee, re-rolled an entire roll of toilet paper, cleaned up the fallout from the pee bomb that went off in my lap, gave my neighbors a show, made it through a shower without dropping the slippery wiggling Emily, and we were both dried, moisturized, and pajama-ed. It was time to read a story, tuck her in, and be relieved of my parental duties for the night.

Of course that's when she threw up.