It’s been a bit of a rough week for Bear.

She seems to have caught a complex case of the oopsies.  It’s an intricate combination of klutziness and mishap, with a healthy dose of accident prone tendencies.  Given that I tend to suffer from this myself (more often than not) I don’t know that there’s a cure; I suppose we’ll just hope she grows out of it soon.

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In only three days Bear has managed to wreak havoc for herself and in the lives of those around her.

First there was the computer.  When I bought a new laptop last year I wiped the old one and passed it on to the kids.  It’s painfully slow, but we figured at least they’d have one to use.  Well, Bear took it to BrightSide’s office to watch a movie while I was at my doctor’s appointment one morning.  After picking them up and running some errands we returned home, opening their laptop to find the screen cracked.  Well, not cracked so much as shattered.  It’s pretty bad.

What killed me was that she said she didn’t drop it – for some completely unfathomable reason, when it was time to go Bear put the DVD on the keyboard and closed the computer to carry it.  Granted, I’ve never told the kids not to close the laptop with something in it.  Frankly, it just never occurred to me to say those words aloud.  Either way, the end result is the same: no more computer until I get around to fixing it.  Which just may take a while.

Next there was the carpet.  We were trying to get out of the house for an appointment at the passport office – it turns out they are remarkably particular about applicants under the age of 16, even if they already have a passport – and I’d been working for a couple of days to gather the required paperwork.  I was a bit stressed (dummy me, leaving this job ’til the last week of summer), we were running behind schedule, and then I looked down to see big brown spots on the carpet.  Splotches of hot chocolate.  That Bear drank that morning.  And then spilled down the chair and onto the floor.

I scrubbed the carpet quickly while praying fervently for patience then hustled the kids out the door.  My “better late than dead” mantra that usually settles me while driving did absolutely no good when it came to an appointment with a government official.  It had taken a stunning amount of juggling to make this work – preparing all the paperwork, getting in to see this woman the day before she left town, finding a tiny window in BrightSide’s schedule because they require both parents to be present – all I could think was “if they give this time slot away because we’re late I could end up having a meltdown right there in the office.”

Let’s just say there was some tense but creative driving that got us there with four minutes to spare.  Four minutes that turned out to be crucial, because when we were two minutes away Bear told me she had to go pee.  “Bad.”  Sweet heaven above, save me from this time crunch.  Somehow it all worked out, the passport applications were submitted, and we went on our merry way to hunt for back-to-school jeans.

I knew finding jeans that fit Bear properly was going to be, well, challenging this year, so our shopping trip would be more of a relay race than a sprint.  This was why I had T-man bring his iPod along – I knew there would be a great deal of dressing room time with Bear and thought it might occupy him.

It turned out that jeans shopping was more of a marathon than a relay race.  Even with the forewarning, even with the iPod, even with me explicitly telling T-man that this would be a long process, he still looked at me in disbelief midway through the first store.  We went through two rounds of dressing room time in that location before finally leaving, and I decided we’d need to get sustenance (aka Burger King) if we wanted to survive the second store.

Unfortunately, Bear had a major klutz moment while I was waiting for our food to be ready.  The kids had sat down at a booth to wait with our drinks and she knocked over my cup, spilling soda across the table and onto T-man’s brand new shorts.  (And if you’ve been reading the blog this week then you know it took him about an hour to settle on this particular purchase.)  He was furious and called her an idiot, which of course brought Bear crying to me.  I just handed her some napkins and sent her back because, you know, accountability and whatever.

This week also brought along a wrist injury on the neighbor’s trampoline.  (If I could travel back in time to thwart this evil invention, I’d do it in a heartbeat.)  It was still bothering her the next day so Bear decided to wear a wrist guard for support, a wrist guard that she promptly lost within two hours.  Commence increasingly agitated search as this frustrated child hunted down yet another misplaced item.

Add in kicking a Nerf gun while wearing flip flops as well as clipping Phoebe’s leash onto her finger, and that basically covers Bear’s injury/klutziness record over just a few short days.  As I write this she’s got ice on the finger that turned purple from getting pinched, and I’m wondering if she’ll manage to make it to bed without another injury today.

But the good news for Bear?  I’ve probably got her way beat when it comes to the klutz factor, and I don’t see myself passing on that trophy anytime soon.