Being the Mom by Emily Watts

Author:Emily Watts [Watts, Emily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Motherhood
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2002-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Strategy 7

If It Can Be Vacuumed Up, Wiped Off, or Washed Out, Don’t Worry about It

When, in our second year of marriage, we took possession of our first house, we spent our earliest moments in it walking from room to room, basking in the feeling of our own space and choosing where we would put our things. The place was immaculate and welcoming, but we got a good laugh when we went down to the basement and found, in the large family room, a box of Cheerios square in the middle of the floor, about half its contents scattered around on the carpet. What better way could there have been to announce that this was a house for children?

Several months later, when we brought our first baby home to that house, we might as well have fired off a gun and announced, “Let the mess begin!” It wasn’t long before we learned how low on the disaster spectrum a few handfuls of Cheerios would fall. Dry cereal—a mountain of it—has nothing on a single renegade Fruit Loop that slips unnoticed from a child’s bowl into a corner and congeals there, adhering itself in a semipermanent bond with the linoleum. Of course, before you even evolve to the Fruit Loop stage, you’ve got the Age of Rice Cereal, a concoction for infants that is frequently compared—and with just cause—to wallpaper paste. When our baby was first learning to eat solid foods, she couldn’t swallow a bite of anything without poking her thumb in her mouth, and when a child shoves a thumb into a mouthful of rice cereal and then waves her hands around, the entire room gets a good plastering.

And it just escalates from there. Unless you handcuff the child to you for the next several years, that kid is going to find a way to be alone enough to make a lot of glorious messes. Of course, the best messes are always made by unsupervised children. You might leave them for five minutes, playing happily with a roomful of toys, so you can seize the opportunity to make a quick phone call. Then just as you are starting to relax into the calm of an adult conversation, the realization dawns that it may be a little too quiet. Either the child has fallen asleep on the floor, or havoc is being wrought. It is usually the latter. Hang up the phone quickly and find out.

I’ve been pretty lucky in this regard. I had only one child out of five take scissors to her hair, and even then it was a relatively restrained snip. None of them were interested in pills or toxic substances. They did like to pull all the books off the bookshelf, but that’s no big deal. We had one episode with blue marker all over a two-year-old’s stomach, but it wasn’t a permanent marker. My philosophy is that if you are going to insist on bringing a permanent marker into a household with small children, you are asking for trouble and deserve what you get.

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