Mascara, Medicine and My Maniacs

I feel like in recent weeks my kids’ penchants for getting into things they shouldn’t have grown exponentially.  Both of them.   I hesitate to use the term “grown” -- it’s a bit misleading as it inherently connotes positive things.  Vocabulary grows.  Artistic abilities grow.  Hair grows (which, in the case of bald-when-born Ella, is a good thing to highlight).

At any rate, I’ve seen an uptick in having to respond to situations where my kids are doing something they shouldn’t, specifically, getting into something that could cause them harm.  This was never more noticeable than it was during about a 15-minute window last Sunday. 

I had just gotten out of the shower, which was cut short by a fear that something bad was about to happen.  From the shower stall (conveniently placed with a direct line of sight into the bedroom), I had been keeping an eye on flashes of little bodies dart across my bedroom from the door to the bed and back.  And then I didn’t see the flashes anymore.  This can’t be good, I thought to myself as I ended my shower and exited the stall to quickly towel myself off.  With the shower not running, I could vividly hear the sounds of the kids’ laughter coming from my bedroom.  This brought me both relief and new stress all at the same time.  They were okay; however I had a good guess what they were doing -- they were jumping on the bed.

Now, I know every kid in America wants to jump on his parents’ bed at some time in his life.  I did it.  I’m sure Dan did it.  It’s a rite of passage.  I respect that.  But Ella is not yet 2 and does not have the surest of foot just yet.  And she was “jumping” (to call it that would be misleading; bending her knees and proudly exploding up to her tippy toes would be more appropriate) next to her 4-year-old sibling, Cal… who is… well… a boy.  Images of Cal accidentally taking Ella down by undercutting her and Ella then tumbling off of the bed and into a nearby dresser flashed through my mind.  Laughter turned to painful tears followed by a hurried stuffing of kids in the car for a trip to the Emergency Room.

Needless to say, I put an end to the jumping on the bed, the news of which the kids actually took pretty well.  They then darted out of my room and into Cal’s to frolic in there, unmonitored by Mommy, while I got dressed, the sounds of the kids playing projecting from Cal’s room as I did so.

A few minutes later, I went to check on them.  When I entered the room, I saw the bottom drawer of Cal’s armoire open and barely hanging on to its track.  Ella was stepping away from the drawer, looking at me as she did so – clearly I had interrupted her plan to climb into the drawer.  The doors to the armoire were shut, but there was a noticeable jiggle to the armoire and the shuffling sounds of a body coming from inside it.  Well, I’m finally witnessing this one, I thought to myself.  Dan had told me earlier about Cal’s latest thing to do, which was to climb into his armoire.  How’d he get the doors shut by himself? I wondered.  Ah… Ella. Wait, focus on the situation.

I opened the doors and sternly urged Cal out of the armoire.  I did not have to escalate to threats in order to get him out.  He knew he was in the wrong.  I simply rattled off a bunch of pointed statements to him with the general theme of “get out” and “don’t climb into the armoire anymore.”  I then examined the shelf he had been lying on and noticed it was caving a bit in the front.  I backed up my insistence that he not climb in there anymore with a “see, you’re breaking the shelf, Cal” to which he responded, “Where? Show me.”  So I did, and I think he actually paid attention and saw what I was talking about.

I then headed back to my room to brush my teeth and put my hair up.  Next thing I knew, Cal was rushing into my room to tell me Ella was making her eye black with my makeup.  Goodness.  She must have grabbed my mascara when my attention was on Cal and the armoire.  I rushed in to Cal’s room to find Ella up against the curtains, holding my tube of mascara in one hand, the wand in another.  The tube had black streaks all over it, as did the hand holding the tube.  Her right eye was caked with mascara under it, over it and on each side of it; and she had a couple of blackened bunches of hair.

(Note: the picture on the right is from an earlier Ella-mascara encounter and does not give this latest one justice. When I say the mascara was caked around her eye, it was CAKED.)

Miraculously, her eye was untouched.

I moved swiftly and unthreateningly and cornered her to snatch the mascara tube and wand from her hands.  Once I had the mascara, I grabbed her and hauled her back to my bathroom to clean her up with an unsoaped, wet rag.  I was not gentle as I wiped her clean – I didn’t want her to enjoy this Mommy-Ella time she had created.  As I did so, I also uttered a bunch of warnings that she not do this anymore (it wasn’t the first time), that Mommy’s mascara could really hurt her.  All of that went in one ear and out the other, if it even went into an ear at all.  I likened it to the repeated insistence that she not touch Mommy’s computer yet still does.

And then I smelled it – her diaper needed to be changed.  So with Ella’s eye cleaned up and diaper likely filled with poop, I hauled her off to her room for a diaper change.

I was pulling Ella’s pants up and giving her post-diaper-change kisses when Cal interrupted me by saying it was time for his medicine.  He had been sick with a nasty cough for several days, and we had been giving him some safe-for-kids cough medicine to sooth his throat… medicine that we foolishly had been leaving sitting on our bathroom counter.  I looked up to see him proudly holding the bottle of medicine and the measuring cup that came with it.  I stood up and told him that I would pour it for him; and then I saw it – the medicine bottle was capless, and the 5-tsp measuring cup was filled.  Goodness.  Why aren’t there child-safety caps on these things? I questioned.  With a similar approach used to snatch the mascara from Ella a few minutes prior, I managed to grab the medicine from Cal’s hands, event-free.

I then rattled off another set of rules.  I said things like, “Cal, never give yourself medicine.  Only Mommy or Daddy can give you medicine.”  I may have included “teacher” and “doctor” as qualified medicine-givers in that sentence, just in case he was actually taking me seriously.  “Medicine helps you, but it can be very, very dangerous.”  And I tried to explain what medicine is and how it’s not natural for his body and has strong stuff to fight bad things in his body and how I wished Uncle Perry were there to help me explain that part.  I then bailed on the “what is medicine?” explanation and left it at, “If you take too much medicine, it can hurt you really, really, really bad.”

With the kids, I typically end a barrage of rules with questions for them to be sure they were listening.  With this one, it went like:

Me: “Okay, Cal, are you supposed to give yourself medicine?”

Cal: “No.”

Me:  “Right. And who can give you medicine?”

Cal: “Only Mommy or Daddy.”

I praised him for being a good listener, probably threw in one more don’t-take-medicine-yourself warning to really drive it home and then gave him his tsp of cough medicine to sooth his throat.

It was a high-stress, highly educational 15 minutes of Mommy-kids time; and I hope we all learned something.  I do expect more jumping on the bed and more misused-makeup confrontations with Ella.  But there was something about how Cal reacted to my rants about not climbing in the armoire and about not giving himself medicine that makes me think we actually may not run into that again.  He was intrigued.  I had proof of bad things, at least for the don’t-climb-on-the-armoire shelf one.

As for me, I learned that as child-proof as our house is, we still have a long way to go.  I have since put the medicine out of the kids’ reach and have moved my makeup (what little of it there is) to the back of the counter, just out of Ella’s reach until I come up with a permanent solution that is safe for Ella and not terribly inconvenient for me.  We’ll see how that goes.  In the end, even a lot of inconvenience would be a small price to pay to ensure my curious, trouble-finding kids are safe.