Stealth cleaner

You parents of young children out there understand the strange paradox of emotions that accompany a quiet house. Usually when the house is finally quiet, it is night time and your children are in their beds. You sort of breathe a heavy sigh and start cleaning up after dinner and Hurricane Matthew, and getting ready for the next day - when you will do it all over again.

The stranger of the quiet houses is during the day time. Kids are loud. When they aren't, there's something wrong in the universe and certain panic ensues.

On Saturday, we put Matthew and Will down for early afternoon naps. Luke doesn't really seem to do well with naps on the weekend anymore, so he gets to stay awake. Putting the younger two down to nap was remarkably easy on Saturday, and as Nate and I were closing the doors on our napping boys, we felt so lucky not to have had to wrestle anyone to sleep.

We started making lunch, chatting quietly, and just enjoying a pause in the chaos. About 5 minutes passed before we realized that Luke wasn't down for a nap. He wasn't with us. He wasn't on the couch, or anywhere else in our fields of vision.

And any parent of a young child out there will tell you... this kind of quiet is NOT good. Unless sleeping, a quiet child is bad news. Like a little stealth ninja... unrolling full rolls of toilet paper into the toilet and laughing as the water overtakes the toilet bowl, coloring on your dry cleaning with permanent markers, or taking scissors to give your favorite rug a haircut.

Not that we know any of these from experience, or anything. So you can understand the immediate fear and distress as we searched the house for quiet stealthy Luke and his path of destruction.

We came upon Luke in our bedroom, standing at the window. We stifled hearty laughs as we saw how he spent his 5 minutes of complete freedom. I snuck back out to grab my camera, and was lucky to snap this shot before he turned around and the magic was gone.