BEEP BEEP BEEP Apparent Parent is busy parenting and can't come to the Web right now

Sometimes you just get too busy parenting to write about parenting.

The cute gummy smile of our two-month old.
He's our fourth child and helps make sure
Mommy and Daddy don't get any alone time.
Totally worth it.

This pretty well explains my life for the last - let me check - seven months without posting a single thing to the blog. Since I've written we've added a fourth child to our family, and I'll be darned if that little kid's not a handful. Not to mention cute little No. 3. She continues to be our mischief maker. She'll even admit it sometimes: "What are you doing?" we'll call out to her.

"I making mischief. It's OK, I put it back." She's two years old with the mind of a convict. In fact, that's one of her nicknames, among many others.


We usually know she's into something precisely because we don't know precisely where she is and can't hear her playing with princess dolls. When she was first born, I wrote about her being my seven pounds of perfection. She still is perfect, but definitely has dirtier hands.

And her disappearances always occur when you don't have time to address them, so it's not uncommon to find her licking a stick of butter in a corner, dipping her hands in a Vaseline jar, snitching from her siblings' candy stashes, or eating chapstick, deodorant or whatever else is in a cute little smelly container. We've called poison control on her about four times, or often enough that we're getting blasé about it.

Here's the mischief maker. Caught her with her fingers
in the frosting. At least it was actually something edible.

"Get the kid a drink of milk and call it good," I usually chip in after finding decimated remains of my deodorant tube with copious amounts of Ocean Breeze wafting from the cute little gremlin's face.

Poison control doesn't do much better than that anyway:

Poison control: "She ate how many sticks of deodorant?"

Me: "Just the one - well, maybe half."

Poison control: "Well that can't kill her. Give her a glass of milk and call us if she starts vomiting blood."

Me: "Can't kill her... So she's stronger now? OK, bye."

Poison control: "Um, bye."

And thus is my life. My glorious, kid-infested life. Oh, and in case you were wondering why I don't just write after my kids go to sleep, they have a rotation figured out to ensure that Mommy and Daddy don't get any sleep and/or alone time. It's 1 a.m. and I'm cuddled up to my 5-year-old girl while I write this. Must have been her shift. She's reading this over my shoulder right now. It's really cute.

Do I apologize for not writing more frequently? Not really. I've had some wonderful adventures in parenthood in the past year since my writing really broke off here on the blog. Sometimes those adventures just trump the time I have to dedicate to this.

Will I be better about writing? Maybe. Your job is to make me more regular. Tell people I'm back on the daddy-blog wagon, share my posts, like my Facebook page for Apparent Parent and generally keep me motivated and I might just stay there. I have some exciting things to share hopefully in the next few weeks, and would love to have an audience here when I'm ready.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to put my adorable daughter back to bed so we can see who the next culprit to rob us of our sleep will be.

Life's a mystery like that.