Kids: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

Y’all, I really just can’t make this stuff up.

So yesterday morning, Jed pitched a fit when I wanted to take off his overnight disposable diaper. Frankly, I get tired of fighting the whims of a toddler 24/7, so when it’s something that doesn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, I just roll with it.

An hour later, there I am, serenely nursing Zac on the couch, when I look up to see that Jed has taken off his diaper. No big surprise as it had to be uncomfortable by then; he’s usually dry overnight (we use the diaper as a ‘just in case’) and therefore pees huge quantities first thing in the morning, so his diaper was about to sag down to his knees from the weight.

I asked him to go put his diaper in the trash, and he headed that direction.

So I stopped paying attention.

Big. Mistake.

The next time I looked over to Jed, he was standing, a gleeful look on his face, as he swung his diaper around and around his head by one of the sticky tabs…and all the pee-soaked gel filling FLEW across my living room.

Horrible, right? Well, let me rephrase that a bit into FPIES terminology so you can get the FULL horror:

“…and all the pee-soaked CORN DERIVED filling FLEW across my ONLY SAFE PLACE IN THE HOUSE TO REGULARLY LEAVE ZAC UNATTENDED.”

I didn’t know whether to wind my butt or scratch my clock! I snatched Zac up and dumped his cute little tushie in his high chair immediately, then stood there, surveying the disaster in front of me.

I couldn’t even form a coherent sentence.

“WHY did you…JED…I can’t…Oh my God…NO, JED, STOP!!” That last bit as he started picking up the damp filling and piling it on top of his toy trains.

See, while I was filled with shock and horror, Jed was filled with ecstasy over this new development. In Jed’s World, he had just discovered an AWESOME new way to create SNOW for his train layouts!

Before he could contaminate anything else, I started snatching up every toy I could find that could safely be run through the dishwasher and threw them all in the top rack.

Then I grabbed anything that would need deeper or more delicate cleaning and raced those to the laundry room.

Then I grabbed the Wet Vac and realized with horror that it has a two inch wide hose…and no attachment that would work for this wet, sticky mess.

And so it was, that from the time “Sister Suffragette” began in Mary Poppins until “Chim-Chim-Cheree” ended, that I vacuumed the top of the train table and my ENTIRE LIVING ROOM with a two inch nozzle on a shop vac.

I won’t lie. Jed learned some AMAZING new cuss words yesterday.

Once all the obvious mess was cleaned up, I went on the FPIES boards to ask for help. HOW was I supposed to clean this up completely? I mean, soap and water is the only sure-fire way to guarantee protein/contamination removal…was I supposed to soap and water my entire living room? Surely there was an easier way, right?

The verdict? No. Not really. So I gave Zac the last of the quinoa nuggets to keep him quiet and happy in his new cage/high chair and went to work.

I hauled the train table back out of the living room (we only decided to put it back in the living room about a week ago, after realizing that since the introduction of quinoa, Zac doesn’t eat everything he can get his hands on any more) into the dining room and got down on my hands and knees with a bucket, a bar of safe soap, and three rags: one to wash, one to rinse, and one to dry.

I scrubbed those floors harder than I’ve ever scrubbed a floor in my life, occasionally shooting glares at Jed when he started to do something ELSE he shouldn’t be doing.

That was NOT the time for him to push Mommy’s buttons, you see.

Halfway through the floors, I took a break with my parents. They were here to work on building the enclosure for our front porch (that is going to be awesome, by the way!) and had stopped for a minute. Since my knees and back were aching, I took a few moments to rest.

While we were resting, Jed came over and informed us that he had gotten “a little bit of syrup and a straw!” from the fridge.

Backstory: Jed LOVES maple syrup. If left unchecked, he will literally pour a whole bottle into a glass, stick a straw in it, and drink it. Straight.

In fact, he had done that very thing just two nights ago, and Darrel and I had come down hard on him. Maple syrup is a vital part of our pantry, but at those prices we just cannot afford for Jed to waste it the way he does.

So here I am on the porch, my whole body aching from the floor scrubbing from hell thanks to his “snowfall”, and he’s telling me he’s gotten syrup and a straw out.

Ooh…bad timing kid. NOT the time to mess with Mommy!

Without missing a beat, I told him “You’d better not have gotten out the maple syrup. If I go back in the house and see that you’ve gotten syrup out, I am going to take away THREE trains for the rest of the day.” (Our normal is one train per infraction. Mama meant business, y’all!)

And Jed, bless his little mischievous heart, held out both his hands, backed slowly into the house, and said “Don’t come in, Mommy.”

If I hadn’t been so ticked off at him, I would have fallen over on the floor at the cuteness of that one! Fortunately, I was ticked off, so I simply forced the door open (he was leaning against it, trying to keep it closed) and walked in to discover he had told the truth: there it was – a whole bottle of maple syrup in a glass with a bendy straw in it.

I didn’t even break stride; I just grabbed the three closest trains I could find and put them in the “train time out” spot. Jed, of course, sobbed and cried and flung himself on the floor.

Mama was not moved by such histrionics.

Back to scrubbing I went (and back to wall building my parents went) and about half an hour later Jed came running up to me: “Mommymommymommymommymommmymommy! The toilet is SO BIG!! Come look!”

I went to see why the toilet was suddenly SO BIG and…oh, yeah. Good move, Jed. He had decided to go pee pee in the potty, which is great! Only he’d decided to unroll AN ENTIRE BRAND NEW ROLL OF TOILET PAPER INTO THE BOWL while he was at it!

That toilet was within millimeters of overflowing.

As was my patience.

You KNOW it’s bad when your three year old tells you “Take a deep breath, Mommy!”

So I did. I closed my eyes, turned my head to the ceiling, and breathed. When I realized the toilet wasn’t in danger of immediate overflow, I simply shuffled Jed out of the bathroom – and locked the door behind me.

One freaking catastrophe at a time, you know? I’d deal with the toilet later.

Three hours after I got Zac into the high chair, I was finally able to take him out. (He sat there quietly and calmly, even after he ran out of quinoa nuggets! What an angel!)

The floors were scrubbed, rinsed, and dried, but I still need to go over them with a rinsing agent to make sure all the soapy residue has been removed. I just couldn’t tolerate leaving him trapped in the high chair for any longer.

I dealt with the toilet (fortunately not a horrible mess to clean up, believe it or not).

At 1 p.m., I finally was able to eat my ‘breakfast’. At 2 p.m., I finally got Zac down for his morning nap.

I’d planned to take that down time to make more quinoa nuggets, since we were out, clean the kitchen and do a couple loads of laundry.

Instead, my parents needed some help with the wall they were building on my front porch, so Jed and I helped them with that, and then they left to go home.

I’d barely started on the kitchen cleaning when I got a phone call. My parents truck had lost traction on the big curve near my house and they were stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, shaky nerves, and a jack that didn’t want to work. Could I come rescue them?

So I got Jed dressed, woke Zac up, got him dressed, and loaded the car. On my way out the front door, another phone call: they’d managed to get the jack to work, so never mind on the rescue.

Well, hell. We’re already dressed, Zac has already had his nap messed with, may as well go make sure they’re okay and go to the grocery store for a few sundries we needed to save myself the trouble tomorrow.

Mom and Dad were fine; I got there just as they finished putting the lug nuts back on the spare tire. Their truck has some dents in it, and is missing a tail light, but I seriously think that pickup truck is like “Big Blue” from the Stephanie Plum novels (have you read those? They’re hysterical!): it’s freaking indestructible! That truck has taken a lickin’ and kept on tickin’ for the last 18 years. Amazing.

Anyway, we said ‘bye’ to Grandma and PopPop and headed to the grocery store. Zac slept the whole way, and Jed took about a ten minute power nap, and when we got there, both kids were AWESOME.

Jed behaved so well in the store, in fact, that he earned a little 25 cent treat from the vending machines on the way out.

The rest of the day, actually, his behavior was SO GOOD…well, as BAD as he’d been in the morning, was as GOOD as he was the rest of the day!

I enjoyed spending time with him! We had fun together! He was polite, agreeable, rational.

Flabbergasted just about covers it. I don’t know where devil child came from, or where it went, but I LIKE the Jed that comes out when he stops being a…well, what’s a name you can call your child that isn’t flattering but won’t make people think you don’t love your child? Yeah. THAT name.

He’s a GREAT kid when he’s not being “that name”.

Darrel sent me a message about the time he was supposed to get off from work saying he’d be working late, so our normal bedtime routine got thrown off.

Without two parents tag-teaming them, they succeeded in fending off bedtime (really – one will reach over and tickle the other until they’re both bouncing around on the bed and I simply cannot manhandle both of them simultaneously to get them to lay down), but two hours later they both informed me that they really wanted to go to sleep.

Within 5 minutes of us all laying down, they were asleep.

As of bedtime last night, the kitchen still wasn’t clean. No laundry had been done. Poor Zac still didn’t have any nuggets to eat. Darrel still hadn’t made it home. And I was so tired I was walking into walls.

But it was all okay. I got some good time with my boys today; some good, loving, fun, enjoying each others company time.

(I think Jed realized that if he didn’t turn on the charm, very, very bad things could happen.)

Whatever the motivation, my heart felt warm in the evening, even though in the morning I was decidedly LESS warm.

How kids can keep us on our toes like that, I’ll never know.

People who don’t have kids are really missing out. I mean that.

And my floors have never been so clean!

And by the way…can I just mention again how GRATEFUL I am to our friends who gave us the floors? I’d be absolutely beside myself and probably unable to function if Jed had decimated his diaper onto CARPET. THANK YOU AGAIN!!!

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What’s the craziest day your kids have put you through?