Stevoni

A number of months ago, we were reading in the Bible about the lives of Jacob and Rachel.  When Rachel gave birth to her last son and as she was dying, she gave him the name Ben-Oni meaning "Son of my trouble", which was changed to Benjamin by Jacob after her death.  We were pretty sure that the name "Ben" means "son", and figured that "Oni" must mean "trouble".  Upon further investigation, "oni" comes from the Hebrew "aven" which does indeed mean "trouble".
Where is this all going.  Well, at the time, we had a son who was bringing us considerable amounts of trouble - or at least, he was getting into all kinds of things that he just wasn't supposed to be into.  Who was our trouble maker?  None other than our sweet little dimple-cheeked Stephen.  I proposed renaming him StevOni after we were done with our conversation about Jacob and Rachel.
I am happy to say that he has not been as troublesome as he once was, at least not in the "can't turn my back for one second" kind of way.  He certainly still has his antics and when things are quiet, I know that there's trouble afoot.  I would like to say that his infatuation for Kleenex has abated, but that seems to be one thing that still troubles him and unfortunately there are a lot of Kleenex boxes around right now since I've had a cold going for about a month.  The other day he emptied the Kleenex box in my room and then must have felt some remorse for his actions and pulled them all back out of the garbage and stuffed them back in the box.  That would have been nice of him if he knew where the clean Kleenexes stopped and the crusty ones began.  Ew!
Anyways, in an effort to maintain sanity and find laughter in frustrating moments, I took the time to document some of the troubles that he was getting into.  Here is some photo evidence of my little Stevoni:

Quiet for too long at Grandma's house, he was found to be eating a Sharpie

Mom you are so unfair!  I want to play with the crystal!

What kind of mother doesn't give her kid cookies for breakfast??!

Bring the kids to the Burger King playplace, and all he wants to do is escape when I'm not looking

Looks like a promising, happy drive to Hamilton

One day I found this on the kitchen floor...hmmm..

The little stinker climbed up on the arm of the couch, opened the clock and removed the tick-tock thingamabob.  Agh!  Who would even think of that?

This was very common in our house... the culprit has left the scene of the crime but it's not too hard to guess who it was

Teeth marks in the deodorant

In case you were wondering, I am NOT HAPPY

Somebody's been emptying out the container cupboard again...

Ooooh, Mommy went outside for a few minutes.  I guess I'll raid the refrigerator and eat all these yummy blueberries and raspberries

What's the problem, Mom?  I haven't been doing anything bad.

Just a little diaper cream, that's all.

I hear diaper cream works really well for polishing your shoes

You've seen this one before already, but this is his classic relocation of the Kleenex trick