By Her View From Home 
If you’re feeling like your kids got into the most mischief today, you haven’t met The Sperling Girls yet. After realizing they had been a little too quiet for a little too long, their mom went in to check on them. Like every mom’s nightmare come to life, she found them covered in marker from head-t0-toe. Big sister seems to be channeling a Mary Kay demonstration gone horribly wrong and a tattooed Cleopatra-style body paint ensemble, while Little Sister is slightly more abstract with a consistent dots and stripes theme.
It is worth noting that all that beauty was not achieved with washable marker, my friends. That. is. Sharpie. And this is not the girls’ first run-in with a Sharpie.
Their mom, Kayla, tells the story:
Our girls started waking up at 5:30am about 9 months ago. We have tried everything to get them to stay asleep longer, but they just won’t. I’m sure every mom understands this struggle! Especially since Jeremy and I are true night owls, and really feel wide awake at 10pm no matter how exhausted we are the rest of the day!
They always wake us up in the morning, and then we have a system where they wake up, we get them a small breakfast, and they watch cartoons on their kindle together and play with their ponies and doll house until we wake up. My sister lives in our basement, so we try really hard to keep them quiet and calm in the early morning. Jeremy and I are usually in and out of sleep from 5:30-7:30am, because we are helping settle fights about who gets what pony, which cartoon to watch, etc.
Well, Sunday morning, I had gotten up with them to get them cartoons, breakfast, and I had fallen back asleep around 6:30. At 7am, I woke up to the sound of them fighting. I called for them to come into my room so I could settle the dispute, but they didn’t come. And I heard their little feet running away from my room.
So I went out to figure out what was happening, assuming they had gotten ahold of some chocolate chips from the top cupboard (which we also work very hard to hide!).
I heard them whispering behind the couch, and when I peeked over (expecting to see them gobbling chocolate chips furiously) I saw their stunned faces, covered in sharpie, staring back at me.
I work really hard to keep a patient voice with them when they are in trouble, but I have to admit, we have quite the history with Sharpie art in this house, and I was… not thrilled. They knew they were in trouble. I took them back to their rooms and starting talking to them in their “time out” session. And then I realized…they looked hilarious. So I sternly told them, “This is SO bad. We need to take a video of this because we might have to show the doctor!”
Obviously that was a mom-lie. I had to come up with an excuse to video tape them without them thinking that what they had done was a funny thing. So I took the video, with a very stern face, and told them to explain to “the doctor” what they had done. That’s why they look so somber in the video. I hadn’t yelled at them, and I didn’t hand out consequences immediately, so they were totally stunned and mortified. It was so awesome. At the very end, I started to crack up; I mean, you can’t imagine how hard it was not to smile when Elliot said “Bajina” with such a serious face.
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