How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Dr. Watson? Dr. Watson? Come quickly....
...So I come in from work tonight and find the keyboard pushed up, pencil shavings strewn in front of it, a broken pencil sharpener and a plastic container of pencil erasers open with five or six erasers scattered on the table. A big rock engraved with the word "create" is upside down in front of the keyboard, instead of behind it where it is usually kept. There is scribbling on my fantasy baseball pad that wasn't there when I last used it last night.
Gee, I wonder who could have been in here?
Actually, it may be my fault. I bought the mischievous tyke some toddler cd-roms, where she could learn more about letters, numbers, colors and shapes. She pretty much knew the first three categories and has quickly learned her shapes. The Cd-Roms contain characters from Mickey Mouse, Winnie the Pooh and Dragon Tales.
What really scared me was the day I walked in here and found the screen on the Winnie the Pooh cd-rom. Somehow, she got in here, launched the e drive with the Pooh icon, then navigated off the first page to a second page. Mind you, there is no shortcut Pooh icon on my desktop. Frightening!
There is another telltale sign to identify that your toddler has been on the computer. It's when you log on and find "File xhe5k3uy8qqqqq not found."
Rachel's computer skills are just a few of the things I discovered during my 6-day vacation that just completed. And I'm happy to say that today, for the first time in six weeks, we have flooring in the dining room! The wood was installed today, replacing the carpet that was soiled during a leak under the utility closet in the garage.
We're all cramped while furniture, magazines and stuff we should have thrown away anyway is moved around or tossed out. Now we have to clear out everything in the living room so we can get new carpet in there. The old carpet has been there ten-plus years and the new carpet means we can no longer play "name that stain." Most have to do with daddy dropping something anyway.
Anyway, #1 daughter has not been real happy with admonitions not to move this or to pick up that, to the point where she looked at me twice in the past few days and exclaimed exasperatingly, "I can't do anything! Such a drama queen!
She's definitely two and a half. Crying gives way to joy pretty quickly and vice-versa. There are laughs along the way. She was angry about bedtime one night and we heard a series of "Nos!" through the door. "No light! No nap!" No this, no that. We let it play itself out and after she fell asleep, we checked on her. During her tantrum, she had launched a half-dozen stuffed animals from the crib. Ord and Cassie from DragonTales were spared, but apparently, the heffalump was deemed expendable.
We should have known when a friend asked her to be a good girl one afternoon and the answer was a begrudged, "Ummmm, I guess!"
Still, vacation was fun. I carried Rachel through an outdoor mall fountain with both of us fully clothed yesterday....not an enclosed fountain, but one where the water shoots out of the ground. Mom was pretty shocked, but I like to surprise my daughter once in a while. Rachel smiled as she informed me, "I'm wet!"
We also went to a PetSmart, where Rachel looked at dogs, cats, birds, hamsters and fish up close. She seemed to like dogs the best, although she later told me she wanted a goat, amended it to a monkey and finally settled on a sheep.
I'm gonna have to talk to her mother about that.