Stone Soup and other Adventures

So I am a legal widow for a week while my husband is working in their Utah office. He left Thursday and comes home Wednesday. It can be difficult to get some personal time in when he is gone. I had gone downstairs to do the elliptical. I had been down there about 20 minutes when I heard Marin hysterically crying. She came downstairs carrying her Dora backpack--or should I say what was left of it. I asked her what had happened. She told me that Andrew had cut her backpack up to use for a project. What kind of project, you ask? I was too angry to find out. I told him that he was to go to his room for timeout and that he had a lifetime ban from scissors. I then proceeded to drag out my sewing machine and try to piece the backpack together again. It is functional but does not look that great. Now, normally this would be enough for one day, but this was just the last of a series of crazy events involving Andrew. Yesterday he had looked up a recipe for stone soup online. He made himself some yesterday, consisting of butter, sliced mushrooms, a rock, water, salt, pepper, and other things I might have missed. He then heated it in the microwave and ate some of the soup. So this morning, he decided that he wanted his sister to have some stone soup. He cleaned a rock for her (he has been collecting rocks since their geology unit in school). He added some water, salt, pepper, cut up baby carrots, and cinnamon. The cinnamon was added in copious amounts. He must have just dumped it and tried to clean it up because there were about six paper towels and a dish towel that were completely brown. I have to give him points for trying to clean up his mess but I was still fuming. About a half hour later, I came into the family room to find that Andrew was trying to build a volcano out of discarded cardboard. His class made volcanoes last week. He thought he would build his own and try to explode it in our family room. Charming little scientist, isn't he. So that had been the morning I was having, prior to the scissor attack. As you can see, I am ready to have my husband back.