We’re usually fairly careful about paying attention when it comes to the Monster.

We’ve gotten better about keeping track of when the front door is open at the house – he’s only gotten out once in the last week or so without us being directly with him, and that one time my wife caught him before he got far.

We’re learning very quickly that we have to be as vigilant within the house.

On Friday, we were preparing for the wife’s monthly book club meeting… though by ‘we’, that really more meant that I’d done my share and had settled in the family room to feed the baby while she was finishing preparing for things.  I had the AT&T National on, and she came down, settling in for a bit to watch with me, and for me to explain to her what little about golf I really understand from having played.  It wasn’t that much of a risk – we have gates or security handles on the doors that we don’t want him going through, and the exterior doors were locked.

‘A bit’, apparently, was far too much time.  And our assumption about the gates?  The one we know he can scale has turned into less and less of a barrier – when we realized it had been far too long without hearing a noise from him, we went to investigate… only to find him in the kitchen, having scarfed down a good amount of the brownies that had been sitting on the stove.  He’d pushed a chair over, climbed up, and gotten to the brownies.  (In fairness, it wasn’t -that- much that he ate, perhaps half-again the size of a brownie you’d get at Starbucks.)

The worst part was when he looked at us, as he often does, face covered in crumbs, and simply announced, “Brownie is brown.”  He has a tendency of late to use colors instead of the names for things, which leads to either us flatly denying him what he’s asking for or pressing him for clarification.  On the other hand, the truthful statement is one of his favorite things to declare in advance of asking us for brownies, and then jumping up and down screaming about wanting them.

“Brownie is brown!”

Yes, yes they are.