Remind Me Again Why Corporal Punishment Is Frowned-Upon?

It has been a little snowy over here.  Because we are good parents, we did the typical winter activities, such as taking Mr. C sledding four times in a week and building fabulous snowmen (OK, Mr. C started rolling the snowballs, then lost interest and forced me to finish rolling, stacking and decorating).

Because we are bad parents, we've also done the typical winter activities, such as letting our four-year-old watch entirely toooooo much TV.

Can you blame us?  He's going stir crazy, which is driving us crazy.  And, when it's 8 degrees outside, am I really being a good mother by subjecting my child to the Great Outdoors?  I don't think so!  

And when he's bouncing around the house, pulling on the cats' tails, jumping on our backs, screaming at the top of his lungs, and "exercising" (read: jumping up and down loudly) in the bathroom at 7 a.m., what could you possibly want from me?  Finding Nemo it is!

The weather is warming (to a balmy thirty degrees) so we've been a little more energized.  And by "energized", I mean that I can force myself to get off the couch twice within half an hour to make myself another dish of pesto or a second helping of low-fat vanilla ice cream. 

(And by "low-fat vanilla ice cream", I mean a little scoop on top of a glob of marshmallow/chocolate chips/white chocolate/graham cracker crumbs that has been melted into a deliciously gooey/crunchy puddle.)

Also, I'm trying to make myself give Mr. C a few more activities.  Yesterday I made him play dough.  Which would have been a better activity if he'd actually played with it, instead of insisting I drop my Better Homes and Gardens magazine to sculpt things for him:

What; you've never seen an aqua-colored bear or a squat-necked giraffe before?

Today he wanted another scavenger hunt.  Since he can only read a few words, I mostly draw pictures to lead him to the next clue.  This may come as a shock to you, but I'm not the best artist:

Yeah, that's right: "cookie" is one of the few words he can read.  What of it?

I (inadvertently) made the clues challenging-enough so that the scavenger hunt distracted him for ten gloriously peaceful minutes.  My downfall, however, may have been in giving him sugar as the prize.  He bounced off the walls again for a bit there; luckily Monsters, Inc. shut him up.

My mother loves to tell how I was the only child she took a ruler to.  You can imagine how thrilled she is to see that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Stupid karma.

As I write this, however, Mr. C is quietly napping!  For the first time in two weeks!  He's been at it for over two hours now!

It is amazing how there is a fine line between a day going well and it going to shit.  And -- in my opinion -- that fine line is a nap.