(no subject)

So I'm on the second day of the Martian Death Flu, and I wake up from a not-very-good night's sleep with a sore throat, a cough, a fever and assorted aches and pains. What I feel like more than anything is spending the day in bed, but of course I can't, so I stumble around getting the kids breakfast, and I'm just finishing up feeding Simon when I realize that Nicholas has been ominously quiet for a long time. I put the baby down and go out to discover that Nicholas is sitting in the kitchen...

Drawing.

With a permanent marker.

All over the freshly laid hardwood floor.

I am not given to hysterics as a rule, but I had them just then, I can tell you. Mercifully I discovered that rubbing alcohol plus a great deal of patience would remove most of the marks; then I discovered that nail polish remover did an even better job. So there I was, sweating with fever and feeling like I'd been run over by a combine, scrubbing big black scribbles off the kitchen floor with this nasty-smelling stuff and praying that it wouldn't completely destroy the finish.

A couple of hours later, I discovered that Nicholas had also decorated his light grey bedroom carpet with a bright yellow crayon. And that, it seems, is not going to come out.

Not a good day.

(no subject)

On a more positive note, the Visual Thesaurus is incredibly cool. (There's an updated design, but I couldn't get it to work: the above link is the "Classic" version.)