Red Room Where the Writers Are

I don’t lead a very exciting life; it’s certainly nothing to blog about. But some days my life is just amusing enough to share. I am a working mother of two young children (almost 4 and almost 1.) My husband teaches, so he is off most of the summer, but yesterday was his first day back for Fall. I know he never sleeps well the night before something like that, so I got up early and went about the morning chores of making lunches, breakfasts and getting myself ready for work while he slept in. Nothing exceptional there. My oldest woke up and I gave her breakfast. Then the baby woke up and I gave her milk. It was all very Leave it to Beaver.  

As I finished up the lunchboxes I heard my oldest scurry off to the bathroom, then I heard “Mommy, I can’t go potty.” This can’t be good, I thought to myself. We had just installed a toilet lid lock to prevent the baby from playing in the toilet water, but it didn’t fit quite right on our seat and was difficult to open. As I hurried to the bathroom, I assumed correctly that this was the culprit. I was hurrying because an almost-four-year-old’s bladder does not hold its liquid quite as well as yours or mine does (think of those older gentlemen in the drug commercial for an enlarged prostate having to interrupt their mid-life crisis Harley weekend with the boys to pull over and use the restroom.) Sure enough, there she stood next to the toilet, her jammies and undies around her ankles, peeing away all over herself and the floor. “I’m peeing on the floor!” she exclaimed. She is an astute child. We live in a crooked old house, so I started madly grabbing towels to clean up the pee before it flowed all the way across the dining room. In the process, several things that are not supposed to be on the floor, ended up there. My daughter said, “What about me?” Just a minute!  

Once the offending liquid was sopped up, I took all the soaked clothing, towels and bathmat toward the kitchen to get them into the laundry. I looked around for the baby who had been suspiciously quiet throughout this episode. I inhaled a quick, mildly panicked breath and thought, “the cat food!” Sure enough, there she was happily shoveling the cat’s dry food into her mouth from the bowl I was supposed to have picked up off the floor when she woke up. I am embarrassed to say, this was not even close to the first time this had happened. I scooped up the bowl and with the deftness of an experienced mother, pinched her cheeks and swept my index finger across the inside of her mouth to snag the remaining cat food kernels, while I expertly avoided a painful bite from her six teeth. Then I picked up the urine soaked linens and tossed them out the back door.

I headed back to the bathroom where my oldest was nowhere to be seen. I found her in her room, naked as a jaybird, playing with her Legos. Yes, she still had pee all over her legs. Yes, this is gross, I realize this. But parenthood is not for the faint of heart. So off to the shower we went for a quick rinse. Phew, I thought. Now if I could just get that laundry in, I’d still be on time for work. I could have awakened my husband, but, hey, I had this under control. The phone rang; it was my mother. “Hi, can I call you right back?” I asked rhetorically before hanging up. OK, where was I? The laundry, right! I headed down to the garage with the pile of offending linens, got it into the washer then headed back in. OK, where was the baby? In the kitchen? Nope. The living room? Nuh uh. I turned the corner and there she was on the bathroom floor with the package of baby wipes that I had dumped there earlier and failed to pick up. She had pulled every single baby wipe out of the package of 100 and had one in her mouth. She looked up at me and laughed. It’s a good thing they’re cute. I stuffed all the wipes back in the package, which made her cry, and headed over to the phone to call my mom back. A quick glance at the clock confirmed that I was unlikely to be on time for work. My mom wanted to know where my daughter was going to sleep when we came to visit in a few days, since she no longer had the sofa bed. “I guess I can bring the blow-up bed...the blow-up bed...THE BLOW-UP BED,” I ended up yelling. She didn’t understand. “Don’t worry about it,” I said “I’ll take care of it. I’ve had a bad morning...OK, bye.”

I got off the phone and got down on my hands and knees to thoroughly clean the bathroom floor, toilet, magazine rack and pedestal for the sink. OK, “thorough” might be an exaggeration, but at least it didn’t smell like the restroom at the train station anymore. Just as I finished up and started getting myself ready, my darling husband stumbled downstairs. “Are their lunches done?” he asked innocently. “I’ve been KINDA BUSY!” I snarled, my eyes getting wide and maniacal. He is pretty astute (that’s probably where our daughter gets it) so he meekly went to the kitchen to finish the lunches and feed the baby her breakfast. I finished getting ready and aside from the usual arguments over finishing breakfast, tantrums over hair brushing and wrestling match to get the baby dressed, things went smoothly. I got in the car only five minutes late, took a deep breath and headed off to “start” my day.

What does this have to do with manners? Well, not much, except peeing on the floor, eating cat food and yelling at your mother I’m sure are all frowned upon by Emily Post.