When you’re home alone all day with a mobile baby or young toddler you face a decision several times a day. And that decision is, intervene or ignore? I know that if my child is quietly occupied outside of my eye shot some kind of mess is being made. The thing is, I spend most of my life dealing with these disasters one after another after another. I’ve become sort of desensitized to them. So sometimes I kind of ignore the obvious, deciding that I will deal with it later in exchange for 2 minutes of peace now.
The other day I was doing just that. One-year-old Jacob was playing in our pantry cupboard. The last I’d checked he was into the plastic measuring cups, flinging them everywhere. Not too bad, right? So I left him to do that and did a little bit of writing. But when I checked back in, he was sitting in a pile of brown sugar.
Proud, sticky, and completely wired
I’m pretty sure Jacob believed he had found the best sandbox ever. He was totally covered. The floor was totally covered. He had emptied our entire sugar container, which held 8 cups at least. Then he had started crawling and spreading the sugar around the house. It was a total and complete disaster, and a sticky one at that. As I cleaned the sugar melted and stuck to my feet. It melted and stuck to the floor. It took a couple of days, a lot of sweeping, and a good mopping to eradicate the last remnants of the baby’s adventure.
Compounding it I now had a totally and completely wired kid on my hands. He laughed maniacally and tried to get into my dust pile as I swept. He touched everything with his sticky fingers. He did an odd little head bob and tried to feed me handfuls of sugar. A 20-pound toddler stuffed full of brown sugar straight up achieves this level of vibration that is truly something to behold.
Tracking the sugar throughout the house
We were able to clean the mess and restore equilibrium. Eventually. But the episode, which was only one of about 764 such episodes I’ve experienced in 4 1/2 years of parenting, left me wondering. How many times do I need to be bitten in this manner before I learn? The few minutes of peace I got definitely wasn’t worth the total nightmare of sugar all over my kitchen. Really, I ought to know better by now.
What about you? Do you intervene right away, or do you sometimes ignore at your peril? Any truly jaw-dropping messes you’ve experienced? Misery loves company, after all.
Yes! Yes!! I have a few Ovaltene, baby lotion, and I'm sure a few other photos as testament to the same question! I still have Ovaltene stuck in my vacuum.
I so ignore anything for a min of peace!! ha ha
My son is only 13 months so I am just creeping into the stage of trouble!!
Love your story though, was crackin me up!
One day I decided it would be a good idea to let my daycare kids play with water, cornmeal, flour and oatmeal in my kitchen. We dragged the play kitchen into the real kitchen, got out the toy pots and pans and I left them to do their business. They had a GREAT time. I even got comments like “This is the best fun I’ve ever had!!” They felt like they were really cooking. But after 5 kids ranging from 1-5 had finished their playing the house was a disaster! Halfway through I had realized I couldn’t trust the little ones not to leave the room so had made a make shift gate between the kitchen and the living room, and when it was over I had to physically carry the children to the bathroom so they wouldn’t touch anything. And it took me all day and much sweeping and vacuuming to get the food out of every nook and cranny in the kitchen, and I had to change their clothes too. It certainly was fun for them but nothing I am willing to do again anytime soon. Not quite the same as your story but a mess is a mess. ALthough sugar or honey or anything sticky does kind of trump my mess stories.
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I know the exact kind of experience you describe…but I’ve never had such a huge mess greet me before! This one is a doozy…and pretty funny too
. Hope you’re able to laugh about it now…at the very least it’ll be the kind of story you bring out for all his future girlfriends.
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So funny. Yet not when you have to clean it up.
Had the same issue at dinner out last night. 23mo was doing a great job self entertaining. Which let us eat and actually talk to our friends. Until he threw his little soy sauce bowl across the restaurant. It created quite the scene, but thankfully everyone seemed to think it cute and funny. So in this case the peace was worth the price. But it is a tight rope we walk with our toddler everyday.
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One lovely summer evening I was standing outside the front door of my apartment, chatting with a neighbour while my 2 yr old slept, at least she WAS asleep. I was only chatting for 5 minutes, I SWEAR but when I came back in she had used a pound of lard, 50 ft of tin foil and all the ashes from my incense burner (about 2 cups!) to turn my living room into a performance art installation! That was fun to clean up let me tell ya!
Oh gosh. So much to look forward to! I’m still waiting for the day that little j can entertain himself!
Ruby loves dusting – her favourite dusting cloth is a SevGen baby wipe (and it works quite well, actually). The flat surfaces in my studio are always covered in fabric fluff. One day in July when I was without childcare and struggling to get a document finished on the computer, I allowed Ruby to dust the shelves beside my desk. She did a great job, chattering away about cleaning and wiping, wiping and cleaning. I thought “perfect!” and hunkered down to work quickly. My focus was interrupted a few minutes later to an announcement by Ruby that she had “wiped the board clean too, Mama!” ACK! My working board. My external brain because I can’t remember everything board! My lifesaving board! Every note was wiped clean from my white board. I quietly took the wipe from Ruby’s hand, picked her up and we walked out of the studio. She mentions it now and then, with a quick grin, the time she wiped Mama’s board clean. I think I’m almost ready to laugh about it now too.
Ignore, and hope for the best. And, take photos when the worst happens:)!
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I am an intervener. Actually, I am a more, wait don’t even go near there kind of mom. My husband is hands off. He is happy to watch as she makes cereal agels in in the baby cereal my daughter dumped all over the floor.
Sticky things are bad. I hope you moved the honey higher up.
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Some days, you need that moment of peace so badly and it is always on these days that something like the sugar episode will happen!
I so know where you are coming from. I will forever remember the day where Dharma danced in a pile of “mud” – let’s just say we were potty training and I needed to answer the phone!
sigh, I also will never learn!
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As a true blogger, you got great pictures and a post out of the experience! The sugar looked like the height of excitement for J.
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I did that once with flour with my two kids, aged about 2 & 4. They really loved it & still talk about that day. Believe me, I still remember the day too, & not fondly. I was cleaning for about two hours afterward. Flour dust had flown everywhere in my dining room, with a fine coating into both my living room & kitchen. Sooooo not worth the 20 minutes peace. When the kids bring it up now, I tell them I’m glad they had fun, but it’s never happening again, at least not *inside*!
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hehehe, I think we all get bitten now and then
In a way, I’m fortunate because our house is laid out as a big L, in such a way that I can see in every room, from every room (except in the 1 far back corner of the kitchen, which is not the #1 functional place to be anyway).
DD e=rarely plays contented on her own, so the issue doesn’t very often arise around here. But, in the times that she does, I’ll sneak a glance up, make sure she isn’t doing anything I’d rather she not, and carry on.
oh man, I know those experiences!
I had a houdini-poopie-painter…. yup, he’d find a way into that diaper and make art with the stinky stuff in a flash! oh my it was gross. He always did it after waking from a nap… really quietly. Even sewing the snaps up on his overalls didn’t work. Eventually we resorted to putting the diapers on backwards, taping the waistband, and only wearing high-backed overalls BACKWARDS (and sewn snaps), sure changing him was a chore, but less of a chore than the alternative. Otherwise he was noisey at his mischief, so catching him before it got out of hand was fairly easy…. unlike his younger brother.
The young son was very sneaky about his trouble. There are more things that I could list, but the most memorable was the time he got his zinc ointment and smeared it all over himself, the carpet and our poor cat! That stuff is water-proof, and I was afraid the cat was going to die if he tried to lick it off. It would not wash off, and he was so greasy I didn’t want him inside, but it was JANUARY and freezing cold outside. What a huge mess and amount of work that was for the 5 minutes quiet I thought I was getting and I think it may have used up one of that poor old cat’s lives!
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