If you want your house to stay nice and clean NEVER have kids.

I was talking to my sister the other day. She was telling me about how many messes her one year old daughter can make in record time. I had told her to enjoy the time before her daughter became mobile....but she didn't understand. In fact my cardinal rule about kids is that they will learn how to talk and walk all by themselves so you don't need to teach them to do it. So don't! The faster they learn how to walk and talk the faster your life of leisure is over...unless you already have kids. If so your work load just goes up exponentially with every walking, talking, energy sucking, animal. I mean kid you have. After we were done talking I started to reminisce about some of the first major messes my kids made. 

At some point my husband and I thought it would be a great idea to let the boys share a bedroom. Andrew was over two years and Jaxson was just over one. We had just put the boys to bed and went downstairs.  Now normally when we put the boys to bed an hour long event would ensue wherein the boys would do their best to avoid going to sleep, and we would do are best (short of drugging them, I swear) to try and get them to go to sleep. However tonight was different. There was no noise coming from the room, no children sneaking out, no requests for one more glass of water or one more story. Had a miracle occurred?

Zane and I were now in an unfortunate and extremely stressful situation that many parents will relate to. The situation that I refer to is needing to check on the kids because you are sure they are up to something and fearing that if a miracle has occurred and the kids are asleep you will wake them up.

When we finally opened up the door, we wished that we had not. There was Penaten diaper cream EVERYWHERE! Andrew had found a can of Penaten and had proceeded to paint everything with it: the carpet, the walls, his bed, his bed sheets, his brother’s crib. When we walked in he was meticulously painting the rungs of Jaxson's crib. I mean who does that? What kind of sick mind thinks this stuff up? Well here is a news cast for those of you without kids or with infants, kids are sick and twisted.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to get zinc oxide diaper cream off of stuff? The stuff is designed to not come off so that it protects the delicate little tushies of our toilet challenged offspring. It took us forever to clean the mess up. Oh and for the record baby wipes gets Penaten off of most surfaces. Nothing else will, believe me we tried.

After we were done cleaning we scoured the room to make sure that there were no more sources of potential mess making and went to bed falsely secure in the knowledge that we had averted any future mess disasters. However, the mess making masterminds had other plans.

About a week later at about 9:30pm I noticed that the light was on in the boy’s room. They had supposedly been asleep for about an hour at this point. I went to check on them and the moment I opened the door I started to scream for my husband Zane.

Andrew had escaped from his bed and found a rogue can of Vaseline that somehow we had missed during the Penaten incident. Either that or he is even smarted then we had previously thought and had stolen if from the diaper bag during the day and squirreled it away in his room to use later for his nefarious plans. He had then covered and I mean COVERED his brother in Vaseline from head to toe. Jaxson was so slick that we could have put him on the road and slid him all the way to Newfoundland.

I'm not proud of this but I did contemplate a few unsavoury options at this point. In my defense homicide only crossed my mind for a split second....or maybe two.....however the only thing that saved the kids from being dropped off at an orphanage was they weren't open at that time of the night so I couldn't get directions and I was too mad to operate the GPS on my phone.      

For those of you who ever find yourself in this situation take note, you can shampoo that kids hair till the cows come home and use a variety of soap options, but Vaseline will not come out with soap. What you need is baking soda. Take a huge handful of baking soda and rub it in the Vaseline affected area. Then shampoo, rinse, and repeat.

Well two hours later we finally had the kids all tucked into bed and ready to rest and recharge for the new day on the horizon.  A new day where they would no doubt cause more madness and mayhem.

Everybody drops their baby!

Ok so this is one of those topics that people NEVER talk about. I think it’s because we are all afraid that CAS has special listening devices everywhere and at the slightest mention of any transgression or questionable decision is going to result in their swooping down and taking your kids. This my friends will not happen. Trust me on numerous occasions I have begged the supposed CAS listeners in my walls to take my kids because I just can’t take them anymore. No one ever comes.

 Now back to the topic at hand.  Most of us have all dropped our babies, or made a questionable decision that led to the injury of said baby. I mean it is inevitable if you think about it. You give a couple this little tiny being in the hospital after both parents have gone through labour which as far as I am concerned has probably caused them to have some kind of PTSD, because no one really thinks that giant baby is going to fit until they see or experience it and then after wished there was an MIB agent standing at the front doors of the hospital with a neuralizor . I mean giving birth is a seriously traumatic event…..but that is a topic for another time.

 So you give this poor couple who may or may not be suffering from PTSD this little tiny baby and then you send them home with no manual. Seriously???? I actually asked my obstetrician to go back in and look for it. I mean if my toaster came with a textbook size manual to make two lousy pieces of toast than surely a tiny human being should come with like a set of encyclopaedias. 

So you have two people who may or may not have PTSD, who have no manual on how to operate this tiny baby and you send them home where they will be kept up by said baby for like the next 2o years or so. How could bad things not happen????When my son was about 7 months old, I was about 2 months pregnant (cannot stress how bad that timing was, but that’s a story for another time), and I was changing my son Andrew and putting him in new clothes. I had stupidly not planned this exercise put well and had left his clothes just out of reach.  So instead of putting the baby down  in his crib, I tried to keep one finger on him and reach for his clothes. Since I am not inspector gadget this did not turn out well. Just as I reached for the clothes Andrew decided to roll over and off of his change table. I ran to him and picked him up and after he finished crying, which was over in like five seconds, he started to laugh at me freaking out.  Several things were happening in my mind at this time.

First I couldn’t believe I had just let my baby fall

Second was a little impressed that he had bounced.

Third I decided that I was the worst parent in the universe

Forth I was waiting for those CAS people in the walls to come and take my baby away.

After sitting on the floor for like ten minutes and rocking Andrew, while hysterically crying I called the doctor’s office. When the doctor heard Andrew laughing at me he asked me to come in so he could give me a checkup and that he was more than sure that Andrew was ok but was not sure about me. This is when the crazy part started. When I got to the doctor’s office all of the doctor’s office staff started to tell me all of these horror stories about accidents that had occurred to their babies in  an attempt to make me feel better.  Almost everyone had  a dropped the baby story; in fact one woman told me about how she did not buckle her son into the car properly and when she went around a corner the car door came open and he flew out of the car and somehow she ended up reversing the car over him. Now before anyone calls CAS he was fine and is now all grown up.

 Their attempts to normalize this event for me made me realize that these things happen all of the time and that no one talks about it.  Shit happens! However, one thing I have learned after parenting two little boys for the last little while is that babies are bouncy and thank god for that.