Chaos Theory

This afternoon while I was getting lunch ready for Phoebe I opened the drawer to our kitchen work bench to grab something and she...grabbed the drawer and swung on it like a little monkey. 

She does enjoy swinging from things—and we have an entire jungle gym for her just out the back door!—but I'm constantly having to remind her not to swing on things like door handles and towel racks and drawers (apparently) because they're not meant to hold the weight of a human child. 

Phoebe has lived a rather privileged life as a rather tiny human child her whole entire life, and thus far nothing tragic has happened...which has only fueled her desire to swing from...everything. 

"What do you mean it can't hold the weight of a human child? Here it is...holding the weight of a human child—see?"

Unfortunately, Phoebe is such a tiny human child that she is still in the phase of life where she is getting larger every single moment of every single day (it seems). So she may have swung seemingly without consequence from any number of things any number of times...ultimately I was correct the entire time. 

And today is the day she broke our kitchen work bench thingy. 

Lucky me. 

Andrew was out doing the grocery shopping and running Zoë to and from a birthday party, so Benjamin and I figured out how to fix it (good thing IKEA instruction manuals are so easy to find). Here it is disassembled (it looks worse than it is):

What happened is that one tiny screw popped off of this middle bracket, which is what was holding both of the drawers on their tracks. So that entire bar stopped doing its job of holding up the drawers. 

In order to access the desired screw we had to take off the entire top of the work bench. Only then could we screw the middle bar back into its place. So that's what we did. And in doing so we found out that we were missing two bolts needed to hold down the top. 

I hunted around a bit in all the places where we usually put stray pieces (the junk drawer, the coin/key bowl, the garage workbench) but I couldn't find any bolt that looked like this one. So I texted Andrew about it—just to see if he recognize hardware of that nature.

He said there was one floating around in one of the drawers we'd taken out, but that he didn't know what it was for so he'd just left it where he found it. 

Now we're only missing one bolt!

Anyway, Phoebe kept getting in the way while Benjamin and I were trying to work, so I sent her outside with Alexander. Unfortunately, it had rained hard all night long—and thundered mightily! One thunderclap was so startling that Andrew and I both sat bolt upright (no pun intended) at 4:00 in the morning! We were positive that Phoebe was going to run into our room, but she didn't (until around 8:00 in the morning...and it was still thundering then). Anyway, even though the sun had come out things were a little...damp...outside.

So there I was, right in the thick of either unscrewing or re-screwing in a bunch of bolts in awkward-to-reach places when Phoebe came inside looking like this:

She was upset that she had gotten so muddy and wanted to change her clothes. 

I helped her get out of her muddy gear and into some fresh clothes (perhaps not very wise since she was liable to get muddy again) and then made the much wiser decision to put her in rainboots before sending her outside again (those are much easier to simply hose off when they inevitably get muddy).

When my friend Des asked me what I did with my day, I was initially unsure...so I told her that. 

"I...don't know!" I said. "I didn't do much of anything, but I feel like it was a rather chaotic day..."

It was only after she walked away that I remembered this hours-long escapade. 

I have the stirrings of a theory about how do-nothing days can still feel so chaotic, but I can't quite put my Phoebe finger on it...