Matthew and his Minions!

The funny thing about having big brothers isn't that they pick on you, take all the fun toys or eat on the good candy. The funny thing about big brothers is that they know the exact moment when to teach younger siblings to do the things that Mommy and Daddy are dreading most, and when Mommy and Daddy have the least amount of time to address it. I don't think it's a coincidence, I think it's a conspiracy! Let me explain.

On Sunday, Kimberly and I were at K-Mart doing some routine shopping. She was pleading with me to buy things, and I was fending her off with retorts of "we don't really need it", "it can wait" and "I don't think Obama's stimulus package will cover this." However, the one thing she made an especially strong push for was to get the twins toddler beds. I adamantly refused. I pointed out that the kids have NEVER escaped the confines of the cribs, neither of us have time to work on keeping them in the beds, and there are a million other things we can do with the money right now. Kimberly relented and agreed to wait until her college was on Spring break.

Then, yesterday, morning when the twins woke up I went to their room to retrieve them, but Matthew had beaten me there. He was giving Kyle detailed escape plans on how to scale the wall and find freedom. Before Kyle could test out his brother's advice I seized all three kids, descended the staircase and filled them with so much chocolate milk all memories of an escape plan surely would have drowned from their minds.
Later that day I came home half day and Kimberly was just getting ready to put Kyle, Mallory and Cole (our two-year-old nephew) down for a nap. Within seconds of leaving the room, we heard footsteps and discovered Kyle had escaped his crib and was smiling down from the top of the steps. When we went back upstairs, he had already made his way into Mallory's crib and was instructing her on her dismount. We put Kyle back in the crib and left again. When we heard another noise, we went back upstairs and Kyle was now in the playpen with Cole. For a third time, we put Kyle back in his crib and left. Of course we heard more noises and investigated, only to discover Kyle and Mallory both out of their cribs. We never got them to stay in their cribs and last night Kimberly only got about 14 and a half minutes of sleep because of our two escapees and their mischief.

Today we went to Babies-r-us and bought a toddler bed. We came home and took Matthew's old Toddler bed out of storage. Kimberly assembled everything and surprised the kids with their new big kid beds. They both loved the beds. Mallory fell asleep in her bed with very little resistance. Kyle, on the other hand, fought tooth and nail. After about half an hour, he couldn't resist the sandman and sailed off into LaLa land. So far this evening, Kyle has fallen out of his bed once, but didn't wake up and we were able to put him right back into his bed.

Big brothers don't care about Mom or Dad's schedules, their stress levels or their willingness to commit to new projects OR maybe Matthew knew exactly what he was doing, and decided he was going to flex his big brother muscles and have his minions torture us. Knowing Matthew's genius and desire to demonstrate his authority, I suspect he orchestrated the whole devilish plot specifically to torment us and overthrow the parental regime! We surrender!