I'll start with this one...

We are blessed with a couple of very early risers! Eli thinks it's perfectly fine to wake up at 5am. It doesn't matter that there's no light outside or anything. He's off and running before anyone else. He's so kind to burst into our room to tell us to get up. If only I was quick enough to catch him so he wouldn't return to his room to flip on the light and start jumping in Noah's crib!

A few weeks ago Eli changed his M.O. Instead of barging into our room, he decided to explore the kitchen. Of course this isn't exactly a new idea either. I've been pulling him off the counters for months. The difference about this particular morning was that my lock on the fridge had broken a day or so before. Let me rephrase...Eli had broken the fridge lock. Well, he just wouldn't be himself if he didn't try to disarm, distroy, or take apart anything and everything he comes in contact with. So the fridge was lock-less for a couple of days. Big deal. What could happen?

I was sleeping and hoping during my sleep that this would be a day that Eli would finally sleep until at least 6:30 or 7am. Something prompted Kendall to get up and see what Eli was up to. I heard no yelling or scolding or anything. He just walked back to our room and said, "Honey, you have to come and look at this." Have you ever been so upset that you just couldn't say anything at all? No words would come, from either of us. This is what we saw:

Sometime around 5:30am, my wonderful 3 year old decided to "paint" in his room. He very quietly went to the UNLOCKED fridge and helped himself to beautiful paints: chocolate brown, carmel tan and mustard yellow (aka. hershey's syrup, carmel syrup, and honey mustard dressing). He decided it would be great fun to open these delicious paints and decorate his room, starting with the carpet. The crib, including the bedding, were not to be ignored!

Well, he knew he was in trouble, you can kind of see that in this last picture. We didn't know what to to...try to soak the stuff out? We're not equipped to deal with this! Within the hour we called a friend in our ward who has his own carpet cleaning business. We knew someone in the family would be up (they have a seminary student), and we lucked out that he was availble that morning. He came to our apartment and kind of shook his head like we had. He worked on it and, in my opinion, worked a near miracle! Sadly, he informed me that mustard is not just something that stains, it is a dye! Well, there is no evidence of the chocolate or carmel, but there is a slight yellow tint in the middle of the carpet. It's not bright, but it is noticible. I'm pretty sure we've lost our deposit on this apartment, but at least it's not really aweful looking.

I did buy a new fridge lock. Eli figured it out in about 20 minutes! Lucky for me, I think he figured it out accidently and seems to be unable to get in the fridge now. Whew! We might be incident free for a few days!