Sweetpea has been told numerous times that she is not to touch the bathroom door. Reason being, that one side of the handle has been broken, so the door handle doesn’t so much as turn the knob that moves the little dooverlackie that slots into the hole in the wall, but just spins around in one place, doing nothing more than looking like a defective adornment. It is, to put it in layman’s terms and to all intensive purposes, a doorknob that is as useful as size DD tits on a horny bull. Most days the temptation is too great for Sweetpea to bear and she just has to attempt to close the door. But, being the ever vigilant mother that I am, I am normally able to swing around from the basin (looking very much like a rabid dog with a mouth full of minty tasting foam) and make a threatening enough face and growl that she stops touching the door immediately and turns to some other form of entertainment. Like pulling the used cotton buds out of the bin and trying to ram them into her ear. Or pushing her way into the shower closet and get locked in there so that she is forced to open all the shampoo and conditioner containers and smear the contents all over the newly cleaned glass walls. But not today. I wasn’t alert to the small movements behind me until I heard what I'm sure was a satisfyingly loud to Sweetpea sound of the door banging shut. Now I was the cool, calm woman of reason that you would all expect me to be. The remaining ornament of a handle is on the bathroom side of the door. Easy, I thought to myself, open the door, growl at Sweetpea for being naughty and get on with the day.
Yeah, did you catch that too? That overconfident thought of “easy” is where it all went wrong. I turned the door handle to watch it go around and around like a twisted merry-go-round horse, and felt the waves of nausea wash over me. Can we say claustrophobia? Can we describe Ceylon as a claustrophobic? Yes. I'm pretty certain that is a good term to describe Ceylon. So of course I start to scream to gain my mothers attention. Only its early morning and my mum hasn’t put her hearing aids in yet, so she is as deaf as .... well I cant think of a good analogy here, so make up your own. I was too busy bashing the door and yelling to get her attention. Finally she heard the ruckus and came to see what the matter was. Never one to stay calm when there is a perfectly good opportunity to panic, my mother preceded to panic in a manner that Henny Penny in all of her “The sky is falling! The sky is falling down!” splendour would have been proud of. “Oh my Gawd Ceylon, you will have to climb out the window, I cant open the door!” she cried, as she tried futilely to get the little metal bar to turn the insides of the dooverlackie. After snorting at the very idea of my even trying to climb out of the bathroom window I asked Mum to get a knife to see if I could move the door jab thingy. After ten minutes of pure, unadulterated panic on both sides of the bathroom door, I got the door hole to give up its precious prize of the metal tab thingy that could hold us prisoner until the cows came home, and sprang out of the bathroom will all the grace of a wilder beast racing towards her first meal after three years of hibernation.
And so we can move to the next moment of insanity that came upon the quiet moments in the early hours of a Monday morning. Somewhere along the busy morning of breakfast and milk and cuddles, I had moved an open cup of diced pears from the place it had been left (on Sweetpea’s high chair table) and onto a good dresser. And can I point out here and now whilst building my case innocence by reason of insanity that it wasn’t even me that opened the cup of pears for her? I had warned her when I spied the first time she tried to reach for the cup of fruit that I had stupidly placed on the good dresser with a, hmmmm, whats the word I'm looking for….? Strong? Firm? Resounding….? Bellowing! That would be it…. I was bellowing “NO!” as a highly ineffective deterrent to her reaching for the forbidden fruit.
I didn’t leave the cup close to the edge of the dresser and there is no way of God’s good green earth that she could reach it where I had placed it. Or so I thought. I'm sure the child grew an extra three centimetres over night, because as soon as my back was turned a little hand deftly made it way over the edge of the dresser, grabbed the open cup and split the contents of the cup with all its diced peariness and sticky nectar all over the softly polished wood of the dresser. Cue the insane screaming of “NO. NO. NO…. I bloody well said NO!” coming from my mouth as I threw Sweetpea onto the couch to get her away from me so that I would successfully resist the urge to smack her into the middle of next week. Clean up took fifteen minutes.
But the fun times don't end there….. ohhhh ho hoooooo no my friends. There was yet another event to come in the normally quiet home life of Ceylon. Whilst talking to Game Boy on the phone, I stupidly make the assumption that my mother would be aware of everything Sweetpea would be doing and keep her under control. She was, after all in the family room and I was in the bedroom. Can anyone tell me what the mistake was here? Put your hands up… no calling out. What’s the cardinal rule of looking after a toddler? Yes, I know you know the answer. Yes, that’s right. When a toddler is quiet for any real length of time, its time to panic. Because said toddler is defiantly doing something that he or she shouldn’t be doing. And it would behove the adult who is in charge of the care of the child to high tail it around the home to find the toddler and stop them from doing anything overly destructive. And after living here with a toddler for almost five months you would think that my mother would be aware of this rule. Obviously not. My mother tells me that she was extremely fond of that large African Violet; the only violet she will have you know that had ever bloomed for her in the 40-something years of cultivating and caring for African Violets. And it doesn’t help that we are still finding little furry leaves scattered around the family room.
So if there was ever a day for it…… this was it.
I received this in the mail.
Chocolate – lots of Swiss and New Zealand chocolate and a fabulous “Red Dress Ink” book!
So to my dear friends Julia and Robyn, I owe you a debt of gratitude… or at the very least, the vastly over rated in importance life of my daughter. … because it’s the thought of going to jail and missing out on eating the chocolate and reading the book that is currently stopping me from killing her for just now ripping the leg off a piece of furniture which I had screamed “NO – put it down!” five times before seeing that she was just holding the leg of the piece and no longer holding the whole piece of furniture.
Can this day end already? (5:17PM)
(And can you believe it took longer to post that darn photo than it took to write the entire post? I am so not computer and internet savy!)
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