Molly! I can send Garrett to your old house right away - just say the word!

So Garrett continues to be my "challenging" child, to put it VERY KINDLY. Among his latest endeavors? Oh, learning to read, learning to tie his shoes, and NEARLY BURNING UP THE BASEMENT last weekend.

Uh-huh.

I think it all began with the tornadoes in our area two weeks ago. See, we went to our "safe" room during the worst of the storm, which is the bathroom in our basement. While we were in there reading books to the kids, I got out the radio, candle-lighter, and a candle, just in case. (There's also a whistle in there, lest I get buried under a pile of rubble and must whistle for rescuers to save me - very Titanic, no?)

So the storms passed through with minimal damage to our house (please God, don't let the sagging, wet, cracked kitchen ceiling collapse as I write this), and that was done and over.

The following weekend (last weekend) we had my friend Andrea and her daughter come stay with us. They slept in the basement guest room, and Garrett decided he wanted to sleep on the floor of the guest room with them.

At six in the morning, I woke up to feed Delaney and saw lights on downstairs. I later found out that Garrett had been awake at FIVE O'CLOCK. He was playing quietly (bad sign number one?), but I yelled downstairs for him to go back to bed, and went back to sleep myself.

At about eight o'clock, I was up and making breakfast, and could hear all three kids awake and playing downstairs. That is when Andrea's daughter came upstairs and informed me that "Garrett keeps trying to light a candle".

I ran, no, I LEAPT, down the stairs to see what the hell was going on, and immediately saw Garrett hiding under a card table. I also spotted two sizeable chunks of burned, melted carpet.

Garrett had decided, while the rest of us slept, to go in the downstairs bathroom and try out that candle-lighter that he saw me get out during the storm.

From the best we can tell, the main thing that he burned up was a sheet of tissue paper, which I'm guessing went up really quickly and was responsible for the melted carpet.

He also lit up (and blew out repeatedly, according to the girls) a birthday candle (snitched while I decorated cakes, I guess), the jar candle I keep in the bathroom, and for reasons unknown to us, a rubber coated baby spoon.

He was punished severely, and has had more than one talk about fire safety, including a visit from a friend whose home burned down not too long ago.

I talked to his preschool teacher, who discussed some of our issues with Garrett with a friend of hers who is a child psychologist. She said it sounded like Garrett gets narrowly focused on things and just needs to be redirected to a new topic.

In other words, the more he thinks about something (Hey, that is a candle-lighter! I like candles!), the more (That makes fire!) he wants (How DOES that work? Let me just push this little button...) to know everything about it (Wonder what will happen to this tissue paper? And this spoon? HEY, this is fun!).

The psychologist said to punish him (which was MORE than taken care of), and move on. She said we shouldn't need to worry about him having real psychological problems, unless he continues to light fires or is cruel to animals. As long as attempting to ride the cat doesn't count as cruelty, I think we're okay - although I have prematurely aged fifteen years in the last week.

In other news, I put on one of my Big-Fat-I'm-Postpartum button up shirts a few days ago, and it would not button around my Big, Fat Postpartum belly. And then, I went to the scale for confirmation that the shirt had merely shrunk in the washer, but NO! After losing all my baby weight within the first six weeks, I now weigh exactly what I did when I delivered all of my children. And it is NOT a pretty number.

That was enough to kick my butt into serious gear. So I followed Molly's advice and had a major binge that night on the way home from my cake decorating class - Starbucks for a frappuccino, Culver's for a mushroom swiss burger, Dairy Queen for breaded mushrooms, and the grocery store for two Heath bars.

I ate it all, followed by a generous dose of Tums, to the jaw-dropped amazement (disgust?) of my husband.

And then I began my new, good habits the very next morning. Weight Watchers is hard for me for various reasons that I'll get into another time, so for now I'm just limiting my coffee to one or two a day (instead of six or seven), and writing down every bite I eat. I have filled the house with foods I can eat, foods that are healthier, foods that will not set off a major binge.

And I know it's water weight (laying off the caffeine will do that, I think), but I'm down five pounds already. I can do this.