I still remember when my husband, Jeff, and I found out that we were going to be blessed wit a second child.  We were so excited!  We sat up half the night, flipping through the pages of Cole’s baby books, smiling as we looked at pictures of his birth and homecoming.  When we got to the pictures of Cole’s beautifully decorated room, Jeff suddenly stopped smiling and grew tense.  “You aren’t going to get all nutzoid on me over this baby’s room, like you did with Cole’s, are you?

…It was kind of strange, because I was rolling along (literally) just fine.  I was busy teaching, and being the mom of and active Kindergartener, when suddenly the urge hit me, and hard!  Not the urge to deliver, but the urge to DECORATE!  I charged up the stairs and threw open the door to the drab, white room, how could we possibly expect a new baby to sleep in here?  It HAD to be decorated!  I HAD to do it for the baby!  As I filled Jeff and Cole in on my elaborate plans, that evening at dinner, Jeff lowered his head to the table; acting as if he were beating it over and over again against the hard wood.  “Watch out, Cole,” he mumbled, “we’re nesting!”

We started the transformation the very next week.  Jeff painted the walls a bright robin’s egg blue to match the expensive bedding set I had purchased.  The set included a comforter, dust ruffle, sheets, pillows, curtains, wall decorations, and of course, a matching lamp!  I also bought the matching border to help tie everything together.  It took us, or maybe I should say, Jeff, many, many long exhausting hours to make sure the border was placed up exactly right.
Now, most people who have stopped there, oh, but not me! The room had to be perfect, so I decided to add some decorative paint touches.  Being inexperienced at this type of painting, I asked Jeff’s sister, Ann, to drive from Gretna to help.  She hesitantly agreed, all the time probably thinking, Oh shit what have I gotten my self into? 

The three of us spent an entire day and a half drawing and painting stars and moons over the entire upper half of the wall.  Special care was taken to make sure they perfectly matched the ones in the border.  To make things worse, I decided that since we were at it, we might as well make some stars to hang from the ceiling the matched the ones on the walls.  Ann looked tired when she left the house, and I it was obvious she wasn’t in any hurry to come help again when she said, “So…are you two planning on having anymore children soon?”

By the time the room was finished we were so completely sick of it we could barely make ourselves walk in there!  Painful nightmares of painting hundreds of purple and yellow stars were haunting us, keeping us awake at night.  We’d never spent that much time decorating any other room in our house, and Jeff made me vow to NEVER make him do it again!
The sweat that went into preparing that room is something that I’ve never been able to forget, which makes what happened, even more infuriating. 

I was in the living room working on some writing for my class and Maddison was supposed to be up in her crib, taking a nap, when Cole yelled warningly down the stairs, “Mom, you’re going to be really mad.  Maddie did something SUPER naughty this time!”
“Did she have another accident in her pants?”  I asked, not worried enough to look up from my work.
“No, worse!  You better come and see,” he snickered as he turned and made his way back up the steps.
The word worse made me more than a little nervous.  She seemed so sweet, but I knew what Maddison was really capable of, I’d seen it first hand!  My mind started dreaming up a lot of messy scenarios, all of which involved a lot of clean up on my part.  I wondered if she’d written in another one of my books, or even worse, scattered my scrapbooking materials all over my craft room again!

I threw down the papers and taking two steps at a time, made my way to the room at the end of the hall.  I took a deep breath before entering the room, trying to prepare myself for what I was about to see. 
I saw the “worst” as soon as I stepped through the door of Maddie’s bedroom.  On the floor lay torn pieces of paper… tons of them!  The papers were various sizes and lengths, and because of the humidity, some had even curled up to reveal the opposite side.  As soon as I saw the bright smattering of primary colors, I knew where the papers had come from.  My eyes quickly shirted upward to focus on the border that hung around the middle of the room.  What I saw made the veins in my head start to pop.  The once flawless border now had huge, nasty gaps in it.  The bright yellow and blue stars, which only hours before had formed a perfect pattern around the entire room, came to an abrupt halt and just seemed to be pouring onto the carpet below.
It was quite obvious where her naughty little fingers had worked industriously to loosen sections of the border.  I could just imagine her tiny nails repeatedly scraping up and down, up and down, until she had freed just enough of the paper to grab on and RIP it off the wall!  Man she must have worked long and hard to accomplish the horrendous feat.  It must have felt quite satisfying, I’m sure she worked up a good sweat!  Just the thought of it made my face grow hot and my heart start to race.  I usually have a fairly even disposition.  It takes quite a bit to get me riled, but mess with my house, or my decorating, and you’ll get an instant and ugly reaction.  My son, Cole, refers to it as my “freaking out.”
I looked at the innocent face staring back at me.  Her long, brown curls had managed to escape the band holding them away from her face and were softly hanging in front of her questioning blue eyes, shielding them from my furious glare.  She knew she was in trouble, but she couldn’t quite figure out how much. 
“How could you possibly do something like this?”  I shrieked, “What were you thinking?  Do you know that you are in BIG trouble, missy?”   I was still staring at her with disbelief; in total denial that such a small person could have made such a huge mess, when her father walked nonchalantly into the room.
“What happened in here?”  We could tell that he was upset by the thunderous sound of his voice.  “Where is that damn dog?” he screamed.
Cole covered his mouth with his hands, to smother a laugh, and silently slipped out the bedroom door, leaving me to fend for myself.
“Before you lay into poor Teddy again, you had better just listen,” I said a calmly as I could.  But before I could get the first word out, a sweet, little voice from inside the crib announced, “Hi Daddy! I powed the papo off of da wall today!”