As Alexis and I try to adjust to this strange new journey where I am home with her ALL DAY, I am finding that we are not quite on the same page when it comes to how things will be.

First example, I am of the opinion that we will be waking up at something that resembles a decent hour of the day. If you were to ask Alexis her opinion on this topic, she would most certainly say, "Awake by 6:00, please!" I'm willing to compromise on this one. I won't expect her to stay in bed until 10:00 (which would totally ROCK), but only if she will just expect that I WILL be in bed until 7:00. Seems to me I'm doing the most compromising there, so I don't fully understand what the problem is.

I suppose part of the problem might be that she came out of her package programmed to wake up around 6:00. She has always done it, no matter what time she goes to bed or what activities I force her into in hopes of extending sleeping time. There has been exactly one day when she waited until 8:30 to wake up (a day in which I probably checked on her 400 times in one hour thinking she must have died in her sleep), and then there was the beautiful thing that was our Disney vacation. I think Disney does things to your kids to make them easier to deal with, like drugging them so that they sleep late. She achieved greatness all through our fun family vacation, but morphed back into her early bird self upon our return. Boo.

Our second point of contention involves the activities in which she will participate as the day goes by. She says all Signing Time, all day long. I say no Signing Time, don't even bother to ask. Frankly, I don't think she needs to be sitting in front of a television any more than she does on the weekends hanging out with Daddy. It hasn't escaped my attention that she has started to sing the songs from the DVDs all. the. time. I have heard her singing/humming "Oh, oh, look at my hands, they're dirty" at least 572 times in the past few days. As much as I'm sure she would really like to learn the rest of the words so that she doesn't have to hum parts of it, I'd really like her to try doing a little coloring, playing in the yard, building with Lego's, setting dogs on fire, whatever. Anything that does not involve a TV.

Despite these little disagreements, I know that we are going to be able to make this situation work. I started to think that a little bit after she stole my Kit Kat and tried to give me back the empty package. I told her to go throw the paper in the trash because if you are going to steal my food, then you should at least get rid of the evidence. Guess what--she did! Well, OK, so she put it in the recyclables bin, but that was probably because the trash bin was, as always, full. After that, I started cleaning the living room and sent her to the trash with all sorts of items. She may have a future as a waste engineer, because she did a fabulous job.

After the living room, we moved to the kitchen where she was quite literally helpful by handing me clean things out of the dishwasher so that I could put them away. Then I put her in charge of putting the dirty, disgusting silverware in the dishwasher (mostly because I CAN'T STAND THAT CRAP). And would you know, she actually did a better job than Daddy. She put all the sharp parts of the forks and knives downward, and I do believe I have nagged Daddy about that at least 1,056,982 times (to no avail). Why anyone would prefer to get stabbed every time they reach into the dishwasher, I don't know.

What I do know is that I officially believe that having a kid is WAY more fun than a having a helper monkey, even if the kid does have a habit of rolling her eyes at me for no apparent reason.