Frustration? You betcha.

The following was originally posted October 18, 2009, at http://www.parentclick.com/BlogPost.html?id=1268:
Thus far I've shied away from the darker side of being a parent, but that ends here. As I write this there are three monkeys swinging around my office behind me, climbing on their desk (a fully nude Jenna is standing on the plastic desk, jumping up and down).

I just caught the word "hillbilly" out of context come out of Riley's mouth, and Mason is crawling around, shutting doors and crawling around under the elevated older children like he's Superman waiting to catch Lois Lane falling off a building.

It's been said that anything worth doing is difficult, and though I know Tom Hanks was talking about baseball when he said "the hard is what makes it great," but the same certainly can be said about being a parent, especially when all three have yet to hit the 5-year mark.

There is constant danger (again, just now, as Riley and Jenna tried to enter the room simultaneously, Jenna was knocked into the door jamb) from sources external and internal-if they're not slamming into each other, they're running around in the store, where who-knows-who could be lurking around the next corner waiting to snatch them up.

Being a parent is to be witness to rampant, wanton destruction, only it's your kids who are King Kongs (each of them) and its your living room, or dining room, kitchen or bedroom that's New York City.

We're lucky enough to have a babysitter who watches the kids at our home, and last week during Riley's nap, he snuck out of bed, went into our bedroom, and did the following: wrote on our bathroom cabinets with a purple permanent marker, took a pair of scissor-shaped nail clippers to Crystal's mommy journal, dumped powder on the floor, and got ahold of a knitting needle, which he used to carve a few heiroglyphics into his bedroom wall.

I could go on and on: crayon marks on the wall (I'm looking at them as I write), endless screeching, completely unnecessary head injuries (just tonight Jenna has fallen off of our kitchen table and slipped off of a step stool trying to reach a marker-again, for I'm sure wholly nefarious purposes-and hit her chin on the desk).

And not all of it is the kids' fault. Disaster can strike during playtime that gets too rough, or even daddy doing something foolish. I can honestly say I never thought I'd be able to say I've bitten my daughter's tongue, but yep, as of last week (I even drew blood). Story for a different time.

But as Captain Kirk once said, risk is part of the game if you want to sit in that chair. But my chair isn't on the bridge of a starship, it's in my living room, and as much as I would like to sit in it, I have two kids standing in it, fighting over a pair of hedge clippers.

I gotta go.