This morning wasn’t a good one. Most mornings tend to have something go wrong but today I managed to hit a lot more than usual. I woke up late so that I had to get Corwin to hurry. Normally he takes all of an hour to get ready for the bus but we only had 30 minutes this morning. Things went ok for a while until Corwin decided that he needed to pry the mud off his shoes with a butter knife in the living room. I managed to persuade him to do it over a garbage can. However, his efforts were ineffectual. One bit of luck was that Corwin had, for no apparent reason, taken to wearing an old pair of shoes so I could switch him in to a new pair in time for Jacob to arrive. It was almost time for the bus so of course Charles woke up screaming. After running upstairs and rescuing him it was time to go out to wait for the bus, at which point Corwin informs me that he “has made a problem” which consists of knocking old yogurt from the garbage can on the living room rug. I put Charles down, send the boys out the door and grab a dishrag. Something (I never did find out what) upset Charles as the boys left and he spent a while crying. After that it was time for bath. I gave him a glow stick to have as a bath toy, but he wouldn’t let me activate it. He just clutched it pathetically, an inert lump of plastic. The bath went ok but Charles didn’t want to get out as he sat there in the water, still clutching his non-glowing glow stick. He didn’t really look happy in the bath, but holding out a towel for him (the signal that bath is done) made him go “Nooooooerererrrrr”, a long “no” that transitioned into a growl. Charles had let most of the water out so I ran some more in for him. This was repeated several times. Eventually I realized that Charles didn’t like the bath, he liked the running water. After the third fill, I told him “no more water” and he proceeded to cry for a while. As I had been stuck in the bathroom while Charles enjoyed his water flow, I had fired up Alita, my Sony picture book, to read e-mail and communicate with Mom. Of course, one of my co-workers caught me with the instant message tool right as I had to tell Charles that he’d had enough baths for one day. I ended up typing in between drying off and diapering Charles. After all of that it was downhill. I got Charles dressed and off we went to see his little friends (by this time it was quite late in the morning). Charles was cryed out, I suppose, because he was in a much better mood after all of the baths. As he has been lately, he was reluctant to put his coat on but once on he was hot to get in the car and go, so off we went.