Another Climbing Incident

I find Monday evenings to be excruciating even on a normal week. Tonight was much worse. Claire was in super brat mode (no root cause determined yet). The twins, who had to bunk together at nap time for the second day running (thanks to Molly climbing out of the playpen on Saturday), could only manage to sleep an hour and a half (half of normal) thanks to the excitement of the new nap time routine. So they were super cranky by the time I got home from work. Kyle returned home after we had finished eating dinner tonight and after I had already cleaned the majority of the kitchen, so the evening was quite hectic for me.

And then Claire threw a class-act tantrum. Three quarters of the way into this tantrum, as I was getting ready to take a walk, we heard a loud thud followed by the inevitable screaming (so now we had two kids screaming full throttle). Lily had climbed out of her crib and crashed to the floor. We don't know how she got out, what body part she fell on, or anything - all we know is she was scared (and maybe hurt?). We immediately removed the bumper from her crib to reduce her leverage and put her back in the bed with a stern warning not to climb. I was shaky (as I always am when kids fall) for a good hour afterwards. We do have a crib tent we had to use for Claire (but not until she was 22 months old!), but it's broken so we'll have to see if we can jerry-rig it to work. In the meantime, I know Lily's personality, and I know she'll try this again. Though she may have been scared momentarily, she was only emboldened by her newfound skill. She'll now try to perfect the escape. We need to thwart her efforts quickly.

I did get my walk after all but couldn't shake my frustration from all the chaos of this evening. Sometimes it really gets to me, and tonight it did. I just don't understand Claire's foul mood tonight (and usually I can figure her out), and I wish that Lily's fear from her fall would remove her desire to climb again but I know it won't.

On a lighter note, I have found pretty summer dresses for a not-yet-scheduled summer photo shoot for the kids. Now I just need to drive to two different BabyGap stores to pick them up (you know, in all my spare time) and more importantly determine which photographer will take these photos. I refuse to do studio pictures after our great 'on location' Christmas photo experience so now I just need to find someone who does great work on the cheap.