Disclaimer:
I really and truly love and care for my children and have not yet, in four plus years of motherhood, had to make a trip to the emergency room.
So you know how I tend to stay up too late surfing the Internet working to help support my family? It might be fair to say I’m pretty groggy in the mornings, I guess. It’s okay, though, because Colum is perfectly capable of getting up and pouring himself a cup of milk and turning on the TV. And little Irene is still safe in her crib until I get up and she never goes down the stairs on her own anyways. So we’re good, right?
Except that this morning my husband helpfully got Irene up out of her crib and changed her diaper and left her to cuddle in bed with me before heading to work. I mean, she was cuddling with me, or at least playing beside the bed, at some point. And I suppose it’s possible that I might have dozed off because suddenly she was nowhere in sight.
I found her sitting beside her brother on the couch in the living room with half a glass of milk between them. Okay, see? That’s good. Only is that a glass glass? What happened to the drawer full of plastic cups that is conveniently kept at ankle height? Was that glass even clean because how could he have reached the cabinet over the sink to get it? Colum? He shrugged. “Irene got the glass.”
I look at her and she says, “I got gass fom disswasser.” Well, at least it’s clean and in one piece and nobody is hurt. I’ll just let this slide and head into the kitchen to make breakf- WHAT the hell?!
Recall that I am Canadian and therefore buy my milk in plastic bags which are then kept in plastic pitchers in the fridge with a small piece of the corner cut off from which to pour. I also buy both homogenized milk for my not-yet-two-year-old daughter and 1% for the rest of us. That means that at any given time there will be two plastic milk pitchers with two open bags of milk in my fridge. Unless, of course, they are all lying in a giant pool of milk on the kitchen floor.
Colum! What on earth happened here? “I don’t know. Irene poured the milk.”
I’m going to go ahead and make a public statement here. At the risk of over-generalizing, milk-pouring prodigies aside, let it be known that 21 months of age is not nearly old enough to be serving beverages of any kind. Shaken, stirred, with a twist, it really doesn’t matter because it will all just end up in a pool on my kitchen floor.
Well, it serves me right for falling asleep. I knelt on the floor and started sopping up the milk thinking that it could have been worse.
That’s when I saw the teetering tower of glassware leaning out of the top rack of the dishwasher.