I am probably one of the most patient individuals on the planet, but today I was pushed to the breaking point. I almost, ALMOST, found it amusing in a way, because over the weekend I attended a "Living the Faith" women's conference. The speaker, Lysa TerKuerst, spoke of how easy it is to praise God and to ask for His help. But in reality, we should be asking God to challenge us so we can prove to Him that even when things get tough, we will still live our lives according to His laws. By the way, if you EVER get the chance to hear Lysa speak: do it, do it, do it!!!! She is an amazing woman whether you are the most devout Christian or the most steadfast Atheist. She is so captivating and inspiring.
So, what actually happened today to push me to the brink? Well, it all started when Eli requested Ian at nap time. A couple of weeks ago we moved the boys into the same bedroom. Now, whenever it is time to go to sleep, they like to talk to each other. I've stood outside the door several evenings just listening to all of the things they feel are important enough to discuss. It always makes my heart swell to hear them having their little conversations and giggling at each other. So, when Eli told me, "Need talk a Ian," after we were finished reading/rocking, I fulfilled his wishes. I got Ian ready for nap time and snuggled them both into their beds around 1:00 pm.
I went to the living to enjoy a little TV. We are still on a strict "No TV" policy for the boys, so I turned the volume really low and engrossed myself in a rerun of Intervention. After about 30 minutes, I heard a very disturbing noise coming from the bedroom. I marched myself back to the bedroom, thoroughly annoyed by the lack of naps taking place, and opened the door. Eli was chilling in his crib, and Ian was standing in the middle of the room. His face instantly took on that "deer in the headlights look," and I knew that whatever I was on the brink of discovering was bad.....really, really bad. Immediately, my nose was filled with a familiar, yet unplaceable, scent.
"What is that smell?" I asked as I took in the state of the room. The toiletries basket had been pulled off of the dresser and the contents were strewn across the freshly vacuumed area rug. Other than that, everything seemed to be okay.
Ian just continued to look at me with that blank stare that ALL males have perfected.
"WHAT is that smell?" I demanded. Then my eyes focused on the source of the aroma, and I instantly knew that I had two options. 1) Send Ian to my room while I attempted to cool down or 2) Call the police and turn myself in for God knows what. I, thankfully, settled for option one. I escorted Ian to my room, pulled the door closed behind him, and sought out my phone. I had to talk to Cole, like right now, or I was going to wind up completely losing it and going to jail. Luckily, Cole answered at 1:34 pm.
Cole: What's up?
Me: You have to talk me down.
Cole: What happened?
Me: Ian sprayed baby oil ALL over EVERY surface of his room. It's in PUDDLES on the floor, the book bench, the rug. It's ALL over his bedding. It's ALL over his curtains. I don't know what to do.
Me: Don't tempt me. You are supposed to be talking me down. (contemplative silence) He's so lucky you're not here.
Cole: Yep. He is.
(More talking, more talking, more talking)
Me: Thanks for talking me down.
Cole: Yep. See ya tonight.
Now, it was time for damage control. I'm no foolio. I worked as a T.A. to the head of the Textiles department while I was in college. I am WELL aware of what oil does to fabric, and at this point I was steaming mad. I mean, absolutely, positively furious. Ian had just ruined every single textile in his bedroom!!!! Including his black-out curtains, which aren't cheap.
Now, I knew what my mom was going to say: "Oil is going to ruin it," but you know how you view your mother. In the eyes of her children, a mom can overcome any obstacle, for instance, the very basic laws of chemistry. So, when mom answered the phone with her very familiar and comforting, "Hey, Dani. What's up?" I knew she wouldn't disappoint me. I quickly gave her the skinny on the gigantic mess lurking ominously behind the boys' bedroom door. Her response? "Oh. My. God." We commiserated briefly, and then mom emerged from her secret hideout, cape fluttering and S-insignia blazing. Super-mom had managed to scrounge up some secret recipe for battling villains, I mean oil.
The devil-oil, I mean baby-oil. Not a single drop left of a brand new bottle.
As she read and read and read and read...............I began to think, "Is it really worth all the trouble?" but being the cheapskate I am, I quickly snapped out of my temporary insanity and manned up. I sent a text to my neighbor, Katie, asking if she had any corn starch. Corn starch will supposedly pull the excess oil out of the fabric. It is the first line of defense for a baby oil attack. I sat my phone on the counter and went to assess the damage. At this point Ian was still in solitary in my room, and Eli was still chilling in his crib. I carefully walked into the room because the copious amounts of baby oil on the hard wood floor had turned the hallway into something straight out of MXC. I flipped on the light to see what I was up against and to remove Eli from the crib. When I looked down at Eli, smiling sweetly, memories from 18 years ago flooded my mind, and I was frozen in place while I replayed the entire sequence of events in my head.
When I was in middle school, my parents put in a pool. I was a total water bug the first summer the pool was in. I spent more time in that pool than I did on dry land. My mother was also a total water bug, but not for the swimming, for the tanning. My mother is a sun worshiper. For the tan, yes, but mainly because she is ALWAYS freezing, and tanning is about the only way she can ever get warm. Mom's tanning habits really began to irritate dad as the summer progressed. He was always hounding her about using tanning oils in the pool. The tanning oils will deteriorate the pool liner and greatly shorten its life span. They went back and forth about the tanning oils because mom wanted to use them, and dad kept telling her: absolutely not.
During the course of this, ahem, disagreement, my hair began going down hill. It seemed like no matter what I did, I could NOT get my hair clean. I would wash it two or three times every day, and still the oil build up kept getting worse and worse and worse. Finally, my dad had had enough. We were all in the kitchen, and dad finally had to get his frustrations out.
"Stop using tanning oil in the pool!" he yelled at my mom.
"I did!" she retorted, equally frustrated.
"I don't believe you. The pool is ruining the girls' hair. Look at Danielle's hair. It's disgusting!" he bellowed.
"Well, I don't know why," she fired back. "I quit using the oil a long time ago."
By this time I was bawling. I was witnessing a disagreement between my parents, something they always dealt with privately, and my dad had just said what everyone else was thinking: I looked disgusting. Now it was my turn to defend myself, and try to salvage a shred of my eleven-year-old dignity.
"I have been washing my hair with that Papaya Plus like three times everyday! I'm using a ton of it. I don't know why my hair is like this!" I shouted through my tears.
"What are you using?" mom asked.
"The 2-in-1 Papaya Plus," I sniffled.
"That's not 2-in-1. It's only conditioner. No wonder your hair is a mess," mom said.
And that was that. The mystery of my disgusting hair was solved. For over a week, I had just been conditioning two or three times a day and never washing. Plus, mom and dad's ongoing argument was finally put to rest.
Back to the present. Looking down at Eli, and his frighteningly greasy head, I realized that not only had Ian doused every single surface of his bedroom, Eli's head had also been the target of his baby oil rampage. His hair was like an oil slick! I was so ticked off because I had planned on skipping baths tonight, out of respect for my poor dry, cracked hands. That was no longer a possibility, but I couldn't even think about it at the time. I lifted Eli out of his crib and sent him to play in the other room while I began to clean.
No, that isn't stylishly piecy. It's covered in baby oil!
As I looked around, I realized the full extent of the damage. The rug was soaked. The book bench was absolutely covered in and dripping oil. The curtains had spots the size of dinner plates and so did Ian's bedding. I didn't even know where to start. I decided cleaning up the actual puddles, yes puddles, of oil from the floor would be the best first step. It took two baby bath towels to sop up the mess, but the floors were still dangerously slick. Then I began gathering all of the textiles that needed to be cleaned, i.e. everything but one curtain panel.
I went to check my phone to see if Katie had responded to my text. She hadn't. I decided to call my neighbor, June. June only had a couple of tablespoons of corn starch, but offered to go to the store and buy some for me. Are you kidding me?!?!?! How awesome is she?!?!? I gladly accepted such a generous offer because I was in the middle of an oil crisis comparable to BP's mess in the gulf in 2010. I didn't have time to play the whole, "Oh, I couldn't let you do that" game. I NEEDED SUPPLIES!!!! I am so, so, so grateful to June. If you see June out and about, give her a hug and tell her I let you know what an awesome person she is. Here's a picture of her so you know what she looks like.........
June
While I waited for my delivery of corn starch, I scrubbed the floor with Dawn for the first of six times. Yes, SIX times. The oil was so thick on the floor that one, two, three, four, five moppings were simply not enough. I will say that I have never oiled our hardwood floors, so I guess that in some strange way, Ian did me a favor. While waiting for the floor to dry, I lugged all of the oil-laden linens to the dining room.
I spread all of the fabrics out on the dining room table so I could cover the oil spots in corn starch. Once I had everything in the fish bowl that is our dining room, all of the natural light made me acutely aware of the fact that there were a lot more spots than I had originally believed. Sweet peaches.
Well, I had already mentally committed to salvaging these fabrics, like a true Supermom, so I needed to just suck it up and get to work. In the mean time, Ian let himself out of solitary and went to play in his room, slamming the door behind him to insure his privacy. The last thing I wanted to do was be around Ian, so I didn't even bother to reprimand the door slamming and went back to covering everything in corn starch.
Corn starch is an f-ing nightmare. Its fine particles lingered for minutes in the air after the slightest disruption. It swirled around me and slowly covered the floor in a thin layer of fine powder. I was so irritated by the mess I was going to have to clean up because of a mess I was trying to clean up, that I was ready to throw all of the fabrics into the yard and start a fire. The incessant yelling, "Help us, mommy!" coming from the bedroom wasn't improving my mood at all. It wasn't a true cry for help, it was more of a whiny, annoying cry for help. After I finally had all of the oil spots covered, I went to see what could possibly be wrong with the boys now.
I turned the knob and pushed open the door, only to be utterly confused when it wouldn't move.
"Ian. What are you doing? Get out of the way, please," I hollered into the room.
"I'm not," he called back.
"What's in front of the door? Move it," I instructed.
"I can't," Ian whined.
Now, this is hard to describe, but at the time the closet door was open. Whenever I pushed on the door to the room, the door to the closet would prevent it from opening. I couldn't see into the room. I pushed and pushed and pushed, but I could not get the door to open. I began to panic. Even though I couldn't see what was going on, I knew exactly what was blocking the door. I thought about calling my neighbor, Katie, because I didn't know how I was going to be able to get the boys out of the bedroom. I don't know what I thought she would be able to do, but it seemed like the best possible idea at the time. I knew the windows were locked, so the only way into the room was through the doorway or busting out a window. For the next TWENTY minutes, I shoved with all 125 lbs. (yeah, right) of me. Of course, I was trying to remain cool as a cucumber as my boys were becoming more and more panicked by the minute. Eventually, I was able to dig deep for every ounce of strength I had, and I knocked the room door free of the closet door. I was then able to see exactly what I suspected.
When I had stripped Ian's bed, I had had to take the mattress off of the box spring in order to remove the fitted sheet covering the box spring. I had left the mattress propped against Eli's crib and didn't think anything about it when I heard Ian slam the door upon his entry of the bedroom. The boys had knocked the mattress over and it was wedged longways between the door and Ian's bed. The bedroom door: Could. Not. Open.
Since I couldn't see into the room, I stuck the camera in the room to take a picture and make sure the boys were alright and out of the way. Aside from being extremely puzzled by the arm sticking through the crack of the door, they were fine.
I was able to stick my arm in the crack and eventually lift the mattress off of the floor. It was incredibly difficult because it was SUCH an awkward angle and I had to push the door into the mattress in order for the crack to be large enough for me to maneuver my arm freely. But, ultimately, my children were freed from their self-created prison.
It was then time to go back to the dining room and begin removing the first round of corn starch. I had to take all of the fabrics over to the sink, shake them out, scrub all of the sticky starch off with a toothbrush, and then inspect the spots. If the spot was gone, or at least greatly diminished, the fabric went in the "hand wash with dish soap" pile. If the spot was still there, the fabric went back to the table for another round of corn starch. The results were not good. What do you know, the baby oil did exactly what oil does......stained the fabrics.
After shaking out the first round of corn starch
I was one curtain panel away from cleaning the first round of corn starch off of everything, when I discovered Ian was being a three-year-old boy.
He had climbed into the chair at the end of the table and just helped himself to a little play time in the last remaining pile of corn starch. I couldn't believe that I was this close to having the first mess under control, and then Ian had to..........be Ian. If I wasn't in the middle of cleaning up a gallon of baby oil, perhaps this wouldn't have bothered me so much. But I gotta admit, I was irritated. I brushed him off, repressed the urge to scream, and sent him on his way.
I now took all of the still-stained linens back to the dining room and covered them in a second round of corn starch. The corn starch was still a nightmare, just as it was the first time, but I was hopeful that it would work. Maybe it's just the tightwad in me, but I really thought that all of my efforts to clean the baby oil would be rewarding or something. They didn't feel rewarding at all. All I felt was thoroughly irritated and ready to flip out. I was also read to call Johnson & Johnson what a gigantic load of bull-corn their "child proof" caps
were.
While the second round of corn starch absorbed the oil for another fifteen minutes, I returned to the sink to scrub the sheets and one curtain panel with dish soap in HOT water. This was the most ridiculous process I could have ever imagined. I finally scrubbed the sheets and the first panel well enough that they were ready to go into the washing machine. I had to wash everything on warm to make sure I didn't set the stain. While the washer did its thang and the corn starch absorbed the oil, I went to scrub the floor again. Then it was back to the sink to scrub all of the linens with a toothbrush in order to remove all of the corn starch. By this point, Eli's quilt, one more curtain panel, and Ian's pillow sham were ready to be scrubbed with dish soap in hot water. The fitted sheet for the box spring and the last curtain panel needed ANOTHER round of corn starch.
I got right back to it, submerging my gloved hands in the piping hot water and scrubbing away. The whole time I was conversing with God. I kept thinking about everything Lysa had said at the conference. Talking about facing challenges and behaving according to the way God wants us to behave. Being calm and patient. Parenting with love and kindness when it is really, really, really difficult. I could just picture God sitting in a Laz-E Boy, laughing his head off as I tried to remain calm in the midst of my greasy disaster. What a warped sense of humor.
After I had my starching/soaking/washing under control, I went to scrub the floor for a THIRD and FOURTH time, and I was burning up. Talk about a work out! This was insane. So, I decided to ditch my sweatshirt, and I realized what I disaster I had become. I was covered in just about as much corn starch as every other piece of fabric in this house. Gross. Gross, gross, gross.
Eventually, things were finishing up in the final step of the cleaning process. This is the best part. (Not at all true) You dry everything to see if the whole corn starch/dish soap/washing machine thing works. BUT.....you can't use the dryer, you have to air dry it because the dryer will what? That's right, "set" the damn "stain!" Are. You. Kidding. Me? So, I now have a gigantic pile of laundry that I am attempting to air dry in my laundry room because you KNOW I don't want to what? Yes: "Set the Stain."
Once I started arranging the stuff for air drying, I of course went to scrub the floor AGAIN! Aaaaahhhhh!!!! Are you kidding me?!?! Damn you, baby oil. Damn you!
While this entire clean-up effort was under way, I was still "parenting" the boys. I use that term VERY loosely. During the clean-up, I allowed the boys to watch TV, which has been outlawed for the past two and a half weeks. I have no clue what the boys watched. I'm fairly certain that it was a train DVD, but I'll be honest, they could have popped in Goodfellas and I wouldn't have noticed. I was just a wee bit busy with something else. I also managed to feed the boys a snack in the midst of the chaos. Impressed? Don't be. As far as I can recollect, I gave Eli between five and seven Kraft singles, two sticks of string cheese, three packets of Pez, and a Kool-Aid Jammer. Ian ate one stick of string cheese, three packets of Pez, and sprayed his Kool-Aid Jammer all over the front of the washing machine by accident. I tossed him a towel, said "Clean it up," and walked back to the sink to hand scrub curtains again. I just couldn't deal with that mess too.
From discovery to neutralization took three and a half hours! I am absolutely exhausted. I can barely walk through the house because my feet absorbed so much oil during the clean-up that it's like walking on ice. I think that I managed to salvage all of the linens, but at this point I really don't care any more. I love being a mommy. It brings me more joy to care for my family than anything else even comes close to bringing. But, I swear to you, if I have to clean up a full bottle of baby oil one more time...........I'm leaving and never coming back.
