Adventures in Parenting a.k.a Grody Things

It’s the day after Mother’s Day.   The chocolates have been eaten, the flowers are wilting, and all the mothers around the world are back to cooking suppers and cleaning up messes, don’t forget the never-ending messes.  Yes, throw me into that lot as well as it has been a doozy of a day with the mess o’ meter going full throttle here.  It’s needle is all the way to the right, the red light is blinking rapidly and horns are blaring.  This is the house of a toddler.

Through the messes and the accidents that have occurred just today, I have come to the very profound conclusion tonight, that my sweet girl will not make it in the medical profession.  I’m writing it down in case I forget to tell her when she’s taking anatomy and filling out admission papers to some high falutin’ medical school 9,000 miles away.  Not that I care whether she is a doctor or a nurse or a street-walker, I’d love her all the same.

I don’t know, I could be wrong, I’ve been known to be.  So let me lay it out for you and you can understand where I’m coming from.    For starters, this morning she had a bit of a mucous problem, putting it nicely.  At one point, she smeared her shirt sleeve along her nose, as all kids do, and well, “stuff” ended up on her sleeve.  I was rushing for the kleenex and she sat in the chair, looking at it, rubbing it on the chair, and gagging.

What?  2 year-olds gag at grody things?  Two year olds ARE grody things, how can they differentiate?

Later in the day I got a splinter.  We’d been outside playing and who knows what I did, but I somehow got one of those tiny, annoying, yet painful splinters in my thumb.  We came inside and she followed me to the bathroom.  The instant I pulled out the tweezers and went to work, she began to cry and protest and tell me she doesn’t like that.  Then she ran off crying.

Then somehow later in the day, I scratched my arm pretty good.  By what or how, I do not know.  I’m as bad as a kid myself.  It’s the kind of scratch like the end of a pipe cleaner would leave.  A wire scratch.  Once again EK started crying and protesting how she doesn’t like my scratch and exited the room.

Then tonight, when it’s supposed to be winding down time, and a mom should be able to put up her feet and drink a glass of wine, a really big mess happened.  To save my daughter’s dignity in case she reads this when she’s twelve, I won’t go into details.  Let me just say in order to get the point across, it involves the bathroom, bleach, a mop, and a mother’s love to clean it up. It was a case of bad timing on Ek’s part that left her in tears and the bathroom with a lot of sights and smells.

I’d just returned from taking out the trash and returned to a wailing toddler in the bathroom.  I go into mother-drive and begin the cleaning process which involves cleaning the toddler as well.  The whole time I’m cleaning, she is sitting on the potty and gagging.  I thought she was going to vomit, her gagging got so bad.  I had to hand her a trashcan so I wouldn’t have that to deal with as well, but fortunately she got it under control after about a minute. And I got every thing else under control about 30 minutes later.

This is definitely not a learned behavior.  No one gags here.  No one cries and runs off at the sight of a boo-boo.  Unless there’s a lot of blood, and in that case, I have a tendency to almost pass out, but that was a long time ago and a whole different blog post.

So she cries and runs off at the sight of a scratch and tweezers, and gags violently at the sight and smell of bodily functions, I seriously think performing open heart surgery or a colonoscopy is out of the question for her.  At age two anyway.  Perhaps she’ll outgrow it and go on to deal with lots of grody things in stride.  But for now, it’s a little bit comical watching her react this way.  Well it would be  comical if it wasn’t so grody and I wasn’t the one  having to clean it up.  But after it’s all over, it’s a little bit comical.

Tonight when everyone winds down, I’m  going to  put my feet up and thank my lucky stars that tomorrow is a new day and that I don’t have carpet in the bathroom.