Happy Mothers’ Day!
What could be more traditional on Mother's Day than Daddy convincing the kids to serve Mom breakfast in bed? When the oldest is five, and the twins are two, there's a limit to what the kids can do. Besides, Scooter (the five-year-old) was sleeping in, just like mom. With the twins pacified via a DVD of Bugs Bunny cartoons, I assembled a breakfast of fruit crepes, then woke Scooter to help deliver it.
We carried the tray upstairs to a delighted and not-very-surprised She Who Puts Up With My Kids. [Note to longtime readers: I am referring to her this way just for today, and you shall soon see why.] [Note to not-so-longtime readers: The kids are actually ours, except when they're misbehaving, at which time they're mine.]
This was when the metaphorical wheels came off the metaphorical bus.
I returned downstairs to get breakfast for myself and the kids. When I got to the kitchen, however, it was yellow.
Yellow floor. Yellow cabinets. Yellow walls.
Yellow toddlers.
In the middle of the yellow, the twins were pushing rags through an enormous puddle of paint while cheerfully babbling about "cleaning up the mess," in that special way of two-year-olds. The primary effect of their efforts being to make sure that the yellow completely covered every surface. A 16-ounce plastic paint container lay broken and empty at ground zero.
Every so often as a parent, there are times when the sheer enormity of the magnitude of the disaster your children have wrought leaves you momentarily stunned.
My initial impulse to shout "No!" had little effect on either the paint or the twins, who looked as though they would be next on the list for liver transplants. After that, it...took...a...few...moments...to...get...my...mind...around...the...scope...of...the...mess.
Breakfast would have to wait, for everyone except She Who Puts Up With My Kids.
Prioritizing, I first cleaned off the twins' hands and feet enough that they wouldn't track cheerful footprints all around the house. Then the twins went upstairs. She Who Puts Up With My Kids had a very short Mother's Day Breakfast, as I dumped the kids on her so I could clean up the kitchen.
Fortunately, it was washable kids' paint, which comes off with soap and water. After twenty minutes, most of the yellow paint was off the kitchen and down the drain, though it did leave a sunny ring around the sink.
Pine-sol, I discovered, is very effective at removing the residual stain from the kitchen floor. When She came downstairs, she asked if I had been using turpentine. Perhaps it is because we get to visit actual pine trees with some regularity, but Pine-sol has never smelled much like actual pine to me.
After breakfast, the twins' apparent liver disease was cured with a bath. The bathwater looked noticeably yellow, too, by the time we were done.
The happy ending is that we were able to trade this story of Mother's Day woe for a few hours of babysitting from the grandparents. Even the yellowest cloud has a silver lining.