A story from last year.
Paul hadn’t come home yet and it was bathtime after dinner. Emma usually likes to wash herself, but apparently she got a little overzealous and washed her eyeballs too. I grabbed her out of the tub and tried to put her head under the spout in the sink, but the space underneath the spout wasn’t big enough for her head, so I had to hold her body with one hand and try to splash water into her eyes with the other hand. This did not work well.Meanwhile, Nick begins to ask me over and over “What’s the matter with Emma? What’s the matter with Emma?” After a few minutes of rinsing, I set her back in the tub with her red puffy eyes and I finally begin to finish washing Nick. “What happened to Emma, Mommy?” “She got soap in her eyes, hunny.” “She did?” (He never believes me the first time, and must always repeat my answers back 6 or 7 times just to make sure.) “She got soap in her eyes? Did she?” “YES hunny, she got soap in her eyes.” “But how? How did she get soap in her eyes?” “Well she stuck her hands in her eyes like this…” And yep, I stuck my soapy fingers right into my eyeball. This is not the worst of it.
Ten minutes later as I’m toweling Nick off and Emma is drying herself by spinning naked around the room, I’m reflecting on how much I’m going to kill Paul when he finally gets home for letting me do this alone. Deep in hateful thoughts of revenge, I lose track of Emma. The next thing I hear, Emma is running from my bedroom into the hallway shouting “Poo-poo! Poo-poo!” Emma is not potty trained yet, but we have practiced a few times, so I assumed she was running to her potty in the other room. I chase her down and realize there’s poop hanging from her behind as I scoop her onto the toilet. Skipping the clean-up part of this story, the funny part came later when Daddy finally did come home, only to find a large Emma turd on his pillow. I had thought she had announced her little problem before something terrible happened, but it turns out she was trying to tell me what she’d done. I guess she, like her mommy, was also miffed at Daddy for staying out so late.
Fast forward to an hour later and we’ve finally got both children tucked in their beds. Five seconds into sitting down on the couch and letting out a giant “ahhhhh”, we hear footsteps slapping across the kitchen tile behind us. We turn around together to see Nick come running in the room gushing blood down his face and arms. It was the worst nosebleed I have ever seen, and Nick’s first. I think he had the coolest head of any of us though, probably because he didn’t have to see what he looked like. Twenty minutes later, a new shirt, and lots of kleenex up the nose later, he was back in his bed.
This morning? Oh, back to normal. Nick answered the door when Joanne got here with more blood on his shirt and covered in pee. He’d wet the bed right before getting up this morning.
