My life as a warden for the criminally insane

While ankle deep in sewage spilling out of my children’s bathroom and down the hallway into the living room one of them asked me to make her a glass of chocolate milk.

One night when my husband was out of town I put my oldest daughter down on a mattress next to my bed so she could sleep in my room. In the middle of the night I heard a muffled, “Mom…Mom.”  I looked over the side and she was nowhere to be found. I searched frantically and discovered that she had rolled off her mattress and was all the way under my bed. I lifted up the bedskirt, crawled through the dust bunnies and pulled her out. She then rewarded me by throwing up on me.

I let my daughter pick out a plastic dollhouse at a local Thrift Store and we washed it together when we got home. She then excitedly informed grandma that I let her get something at the “dirty store”.

When my daughter was a toddler I sat on the floor of the bathroom next to her and read a book while she was in the tub. When I looked up, she had a frantic look on her face and a turd on a spoon. So much for the commemorative light saber spoon from the Cheerios box.

A few years ago some good friends of ours asked us to be Godparents to their son. Everything went well.  We stood at the front of the church with them as her father (a former pastor), baptized the baby. I smiled proudly with one arm around my husband and another around my daughter. It was only then that I realized that my darling daughter had wedged her index finger firmly up her nose.

I have had to break up screaming arguments over cartoon characters.

I have had to grease a plastic Hannah Montana bracelet off of a toddler’s thigh.

I have been called to preschool to extract a dyed-green macaroni noodle from my child’s nose.

I have been woken up at 2 am by a child reminding me that she needed new shoes.

I have taken lasagna apart.

                                                                              

Once, on a Costco shopping trip I asked my three year old to remind me to pick up peanuts for Daddy.  A few aisles later she did her job by loudly shouting that I should not forget Daddy’s peanuts… except that she did not pronounce the “t” in peanuts…

I have carried my pajama-clad children against their will to the principal’s office when they have refused to get ready for school.

I once paid a $20 copay to find out my daughter was getting boobs.

Last winter my children used a Tapatio bottle as a snowman nose.

I once found an entire flour tortilla shoved in the seatbelt hole in my daughter’s carseat.

I have showered with naked Barbies, stepped on Lego’s, been impaled by forgotten thumbtacks, and been clubbed in the head by wooden blocks.

Every day is an adventure and a struggle to maintain order. It is my hope that one day my lovely inmates will be competent enough to stand trial and be rehabilitated.  Until then, you can find me at my desk denying requests for candy at breakfast and permission to borrow my high-heeled leather boots to play in the sprinkler.