The Things I Remember While I Clean Our Guest Bath

There are several rooms in our house that I very rarely enter.  One happens to be our guest bathroom, which for some unknown reason had become Peyton’s bathroom of choice.  We kept all the bathroom doors closed because Hayden had a huge affinity for water, and also, I once discovered Addison drinking a cup of water that I had not given him.  When I asked where he got it, he very proudly told me that he was a big boy now, and could get his own water from the toilet.  Yep, I was raising dogs.  Just take a swig out of the toilet if you’re thirsty! 

Anyway, we were having friends out for a BBQ, so I opened the door to the bathroom, planning to give it a quick once over since I thought it hadn’t been used since the last time I had cleaned it.  As I turned on the light, I blinked my eyes several times because I thought I might have had some strange migraine thing that makes you see smudges, rather than spots.  Dark brown, dried, crusty smudges.  But no, it was not a migraine (though I wish it was).  You can imagine what my next thought was.  Shit.  Literally and figuratively.  Not a space had been spared.  The walls were covered in thick, brown, dried yuck.  The sink, the faucets, the toilet, the step stool (no pun intended), the soap dispenser, the hand towel, EVERYTHING!!! 

Upon closer inspection, I was HUGELY relieved to discover that the “crap” was actually dried chocolate frosting from a bribery cupcake I had given Peyton the last time she was with us (You know, “If you please do this, I’ll give you a cupcake decorated like a doggy.  Please, please, please do it, and I’ll give you anything you want.  Please!).  I have never in my life been so happy to clean a bathroom covered in dried chocolate frosting as I was that day!

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Yikes! Now The Oil Guy Saw Me Naked!

You would think I would have learned my lesson the day Hayden threw the front door open for the UPS guy to find me sprawled, literally, butt naked on the tile floor in front of him (oh, you didn’t read that post?! Click HERE).  Or maybe when the landscapers all stood outside my window gawking while I dressed (oh, I haven’t shared that one with you yet?  Just wait!).  But no.  Not me.  I am the sort of person who has to make the same mistake and suffer the same humiliation at least a dozen or more times before it occurs to me that maybe I should do things differently.  Like put some blinds on the windows.  Or take the clean laundry out of the mountainous piles in the laundry room and put it in the relative privacy of my closet so I needn’t run past the front door in my birthday suit every time I dress.  You would think.

Now similar to the UPS guy, the guy who delivers our heating oil doesn’t follow a very predictable schedule.  One month he’ll show up as the kids and I are sitting down to lunch, the next we’ll be his last stop of the day.  The trouble  is, I never know exactly when he will show up, and it does actually matter, but not for the reasons you may think.  It’s not that I am trying to coordinate trips to the grocery store or pick ups and drop offs for afternoon kindergarten.  It’s not that I’m going to run to the post office or trying to plan play dates.  Nope.  None of that.

It’s all about showering.  I’ve had a few close calls, a time or two that I’ve had to hit the shower floor and fast because someone has come into the yard while I am in the shower.  But this particular day, I even set the alarm so I would be up and showered long before anyone could show up at our house for deliveries.  Yep, rise and shine at just about the crack of dawn for me.  This time I wasn’t taking any chances!  You see, our master shower has full windows that look out over our side yard and the creek and the woods beyond.  It’s quite lovely and picturesque, and a wonderfully peaceful and scenic atmosphere for bathing.  Except, of course, when a rugged albeit friendly stranger happens to be walking past the windows looking intently at the side of the house for the access door to the oil tanks, which are, of course, located right below the shower windows.

And that, my friends, is exactly who I saw as I opened my eyes after rinsing the suds from my hair and face, elbows at right angles in the air, fully facing the windows.  An astonished red-faced man in work clothes, hauling a giant hose, and looking as though he wished the earth would swallow him whole.  For a moment, as time stood still, we both stood frozen in place as our minds tried desperately to tell our bodies what to do.  And then we both dashed into action, he racing around the corner of the house and I dropping to the floor.  I stayed pressed against the tile until the water ran cold, and I knew I could stall no longer.  I crawled from the shower and tugged my towel from the rack.  Pulling my robe closed, I headed toward the front door, checkbook in hand and pretended that nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened as I swung open the door and greeted the still red-faced and now stammering man.

You would think I would have put blinds up that very day.  You would think.

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Dialing for Dollars

Addison kept begging to call his nana.  I should have known to ask why.

After dialing and handing him the phone, I heard, “Hi Nana.  Will you send me a card with some more money in it?  You don’t even need to put any words in it, just dollars….. Okay, sooooooo, when you gonna do it?”

After he hung up, he said to me, “C’mon, Mom.  Let’s go down to the mailbox. Nana just sent me some money.”

Just in case you are wondering why my young son is fund-raising, he has been saving every single penny he has ever been able to call his own (and a few he can’t) to take his best little girlfriend back to Disneyland.  I believe he is up to a whopping $36.  Sweet, right?!

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Cupcake

We have some friends who live in San Diego that we are fortunate enough to get to spend some time with each year when they come up to visit family.  They have a boy named Collin and a little girl Addison’s exact age, named Brooke.  Our kids love playing with them!

On their last visit it became quite evident that we don’t spend enough time with them, as Addison kept asking, over and over, what that little girl’s name was.  Repeatedly, I told him “These are your friends, Brooke and Collin” just to have him ask her name again a few minutes later.  He soon came to me and said, “Since you won’t tell me what that little girl’s name is, I am going to call her Cupcake, but don’t tell her that.”  Could that be anymore adorable?

Another question he asked a few times about Collin, but that I obviously didn’t pay enough attention to was,  “What’s wrong with him?” to which I would respond, “Nothing, why?” and he would just shrug his shoulders in an I-don’t-know fashion.

It wasn’t until a few days later in their visit that I finally put two and two together, when Addison came to me and asked, “Do I get to play with Broken Collin and Cupcake today?”

Hopefully, it won’t take you as long to figure out as it did me!

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Eggsactly!

So far today, I’ve taken three showers.  During the first, unbeknown to me, Hayden was busy pushing a chair up to the refrigerator so he could reach the box of 18 eggs on the top shelf.  Knowing him, he was going to next push a chair up to the microwave so he could ‘cook’ the eggs.  I don’t know exactly what happened, as I was conditioning my hair at the time, but when I did come out to the kitchen, I found two gleeful little boys skating in egg goo.  I stood for a moment, trying to decide if I would implode, explode, or burst into fits of hysterical laughter.  My thought process was interrupted when Addison noticed me and promptly insisted, “It wasn’t me!  Hayden did it!”

Regardless of who did it, both boys were covered head to toe in slime.  The kitchen and great room were covered floor to ceiling in yolk, whites, and shell.  I imagine that Hayden accidentally dropped an egg or two as he tried to get them out of the fridge (which still had the door wide open, and was sufficiently slimed as well).  Suddenly, his cooking project would have taken an exciting 180 degree turn.   My assumption is that Addison witnessed his brother throwing eggs around the kitchen, and weighed the pros and cons.  Figuring he was already going to be guilty by association as well as proximity, he opted to make the most of the situation and flung a few eggs himself.  Then somehow, one of them discovered how slippery they made the tile floor and operation slime skate would have found its beginnings.

Stifling my laughter with an exaggerated sigh, I ordered both boys into the shower while I began the all day long project of cleaning egg from every possible surface.  Of course, it wasn’t until hours later, as I began retelling this story that I learned of helpful egg cleanup tricks.  I just started out with paper towels, then moved to kitchen towels, and ultimately, bath towels.  Did you know that egg doesn’t absorb?  It just kind of pushes itself along.  And did you know that once it dries, it is like cement?

Anyhoo, while I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the egg off the drawer fronts of my kitchen cabinets, operation water skate was getting started in the master bathroom.  Our shower is the walk in type that has no door.  There is a wall that is supposed to keep the water from escaping into the rest of the bathroom, and it works perfectly adequately when the shower is used under normal conditions.  It also has six sprayers and an overhead rain fixture.  Did I mention there is no door?  Well, until today, I didn’t know that Hayden knew how to operate all the nozzles.  I should have known better, right?

It was not until a buck naked Addison finally came running out to tell me that Hayden had not only turned on all of the nozzles, but also managed to direct them in such a way as to spray the entire bathroom, that I had any inkling that there was a greater mess brewing on the other side of the house.  I mean, could water really create a bigger mess than a dozen and a half eggs?  YES!!!!  It can!!!

By the time I made it in there, the water was at least an inch deep in the bathroom, the closet was soaked, and there was a puddle making its way into the bedroom.  I had to face the spray head-on in order to get it turned off.  That was shower number two.  When at last I succeeded at turning off the geysers and rain storms, Hayden looked at me as though I had just canceled Christmas.  Addison was busy insisting, “It wasn’t me.  Hayden did it!”  And then I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.  Soaked from head to toe, fully clothed, a dried patch of yolk on my cheek, and a piece of shell caught in my hair.  Should I laugh, or cry?  No time for either, I had to go find the shop vac and get to work on all that water.

I took shower number three to get off the rest of that egg after daddy came home, and I could be sure Hayden would be closely supervised.  When I came out to my three boys, fresh and clean, and snug in my robe, Patrick pointed to the range hood and asked, “How’d that get up there?”  He was pointing to a perfect half of an egg shell.  I took a deep breath, looked at Addison and Hayden, and said, “Hmmm….  I have no idea.  How strange.”  And the boys broke into gales of laughter.

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Melty For Me, Please.

Addison has decided that he likes things that are melty.  He wants his ice cream to sit in the bowl until it is melty.  He wants his Popsicle to stay in the wrapper in the sun until it is melty so he can drink it.  He wants the cheese on his sandwich to be melty.   He wants me to go to the store to buy marshmallows so he can hold them in his hand until they are melty.

I told him that the thing about melty is that it is synonymous with  messy.  He looked at me like I was the dumbest person on the planet.  I mean his body language was screaming “No, Duh!” at the top of its lungs, if body language even has lungs.  Then with a hugely exasperated sigh, he said, “Mom, that’s the point of melty.”

I guess he told me!

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George Foreman vs Hayden Cash

Hayden loves tinkering.  He likes to take things apart, and put them back together.  Or at least yell at someone else to put them back together.  “Holp! Holp!  Whees bwoke! Momo fixit!” is one of the most repeated phrases in our home on any given day.  I don’t think we have a single toy car, truck, plane, or motorcycle in our house that still has all its wheels attached.  It’s so bad that, much like a pilot doing his preflight walk around of an airplane, Patrick and I warily eye the tires on our real cars before getting in them.  I am not joking when I say that I half expect to walk out to the garage one day and discover he’s removed a tire or two.  Seriously.

And much to our chagrin, his tinkering is by no means limited to toys.  He will remove switch plates from the walls using a spoon.  He can rearrange an entire room of furniture in the amount of time it takes me to use the restroom (and out of necessity, I’ve become a whiz in the bathroom –tee hee:)).  He can flood an entire basement while I believe he’s soundly napping.  He’s fearless and curious, which makes for a dangerous combination.

This particular day was much like any other.  Addison, Hayden and I were all upstairs in the playroom for much of the morning.  We did puzzles, read stories, and then I plopped them in front of the tv so I could take a quick, and I do mean quick, shower.  Within five minutes, I had finished, checked to see both boys intently watching Dragon Tales, and began preparing lunch.  We sat together at the kitchen table to eat, and then I changed Hayden’s diaper, put him down for his nap, and locked the door to his bedroom so he wouldn’t escape without me knowing.  Addison and I went back upstairs to clean the playroom, then headed to my room to lay down for quiet time together.

That’s when I first noticed a smell like pizza burning on the bottom of an oven.  I went to the kitchen, checked to see if the oven was on, and asked Addison if maybe he had noticed daddy cook one of those gosh-awful Tombstone frozen pizzas before heading to work.  Strange, I know, but not unheard of at our house.  Addison didn’t think so, the oven was cold, and it didn’t make sense that the smell would be all the way on the other side of the house anyway.  I had a heavy, sick feeling in my stomach as I thought to myself, “Crap.  All the other times I’ve smelled imaginary odors I’ve been pregnant.”

We lay down on my bed, my mind racing and calculating, and then I heard a click.  “Addison, did you hear that?”  “No, what?”  “That!”  I’d heard it again.  This time, so had he.  We got up and started searching the room for the source of the sound.  Finally, I looked behind a chair that we never use, except to store laundry, and saw it.  The George Foreman Grill.  On the floor, plugged in, filled with the contents of a now empty bag of cheddar flavored rice cakes burned to a charcoal crisp.  The sound we’d heard was the clicking of an overheated kitchen appliance.  We were lucky to be alive!

Somehow, a couple of hours earlier while I was in the shower, Hayden had climbed on the counter, reached the very top shelf that I can barely get to myself, pulled down the Foreman Grill, gone into the pantry for the rice cakes, carried everything across the house to the master bedroom, gone to the far corner of the room, plugged in the grill, poured on his rice cakes, gone all the way to the other side of the house again, gone upstairs, and plopped down on the couch to finish watching ‘Tales’ as though he’d been there all along, and then forgotten all about his little cooking project.

Thank God I wasn’t pregnant.

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