10 minutes (just 10)

10 minutes...

... in the life of the 3-child circus.

Trying to get dinner on the table.  Older children have some respect for the written and illustrated Getting Ready for Dinner Routine, and are proven capable of doing it.  I ask them to clear the table, in English and Luganda.  Hibiscus and Emerson are sliding around dramatically on the just-mopped floor (or was it when Buttercup had just peed but it hadn't been mopped yet?) and pretending to fall and landing on all fours with their bums in the air, and shrieking with the most hysterical laughter of which children are capable.  Which is quite very much hysterical.  Somewhere around a potential broken nose, I look over at Buttercup.  She is perched on a chair, moving things around on the table because that's what I said to do.  Her main effect is knocking over several glasses of water.  The floor is now even more wet and slippery.

Somehow we have gotten to the point of the bigger kids noticing the table, I forget exactly how.  Hibiscus starts getting the egico (spoons) and then Emerson has to get the egico and is ready to dive-bomb her midway to the table because he actually was planning all along to set out spoons.  I suggest he put out napkins.  Instead of finding it in the drawer, the silverware is on the drying rack and Daddy dries it to hand to Hibiscus.  One spoon lands in the mop bucket full of dirty water, which is standing at the ready because there is cause to mop the floor for about every ten minutes of child activity.  This is hysterical.  Hibiscus puts spoons on the table, because Emerson is distracted by piling up all the cushions on the couch and jumping on top of them.  Hibiscus realizes that she had laid a baby teddy bear for his nap on exactly the bottom cushion that he is piled on, and screams bloody murder and tries to pull him off the top of his precarious pile, and he starts to fight back desperately without understanding the slightest bit about the "baby" in question.  Meanwhile, Buttercup remembers that I've asked to put the napkins on the table, and goes over to get the napkin-and-important-stuff basket, which is large enough (and full enough) that all she manages is to upend the entire thing on the floor.

Hibiscus remembers the spoon in the mop bucket, which Daddy has just taken out and washed while she was involved in the Squashed Baby Drama.  She screams with laughter and dives over and starts flapping around in the dirty water, while Daddy tries to first of all convince her that the spoon is already removed, and secondly that she needs to wash her hands before returning to set the table.  She starts to cry because "me I have finished wash hands!"  Hibiscus crying usually means falling on anything available, such as people or the floor, and flopping around like a very large fish with skinny arms, which her parents know all about because they end up dragging her around by said skinny arms so she is not in the mop bucket or the middle of the street or falling off the stairs or bruising her brother.  Emerson has forgotten about the squashed baby, but still somehow it is Mama who fixes the napkin basket and puts them on the table.  Oh yes, because Emerson is busy being hysterical that there aren't enough of the pink cloth napkins for everyone, and he can't possibly use a paper napkin, like we used every day until I cut up a towel last week, if there are pink napkins extant.  Although of course, if he actually set the napkins out he could put them wherever he wanted.  Instead, he puts lego boxes on his feet, and Hibiscus attacks him because one of the lego boxes had originally had her legos in it.

Buttercup, valiantly following the example presented, is quietly diving head first into the mop bucket.