As I blindingly venture into my future as a responsible parent (no, seriously; stay with me.) I now appreciate that my parents had a very (and I mean VERY) challenging job, what with my alleged hyperactivity, my unconscionably high intake of Rondo – The Thirst Crusher, and my carefree use of parentheses (like this one. You know, I should just write the whole damn blog in parentheses if I like them so much.)
Where was I? Oh yes, my unholy experiences as a disturbingly hyperactive blond kid from the suburbs.
This gets less cute the longer I’m a parent.
Like this one time as a kid, I saw one of those “scrubbing bubbles” commercials on TV. You know, the ones where the animated bubbles behave with a hive mentality that should have been of considerable interest to the military establishment at the time? Well, being 7, I saw the commercial, then immediately ran to the bathroom, took out the scrubbing bubbles can from under the sink and proceeded to spray it all over the small, poorly ventilated, lime-green deathtrap of a confined space. Basically, I wanted to see the bubbles haul ass around the bathroom and I didn’t yet know the definition of “consequences” or “Diethylene glycol monobutyl ether.”
Here’s what happened. There were no cool-looking bubbles autonomously moving around the bathroom while cleaning everything in sight, and there certainly was none of that shiny, sparkling clean effect that you always see in TV commercials; just gobs and gobs of (probably) toxic cleaning foam. I passed out and woke up several hours later in the vegetable garden. When I walked in the house, reeking of peat moss and cleanser, my Dad calmly told me that when a boy does stupid crap, he has to sleep in the vegetable garden. The lesson is, be careful when you do stupid things, because a loved one might be forced to drag your unconscious, drooling sack of a carcass out to the garden to sleep it off.
My memory may be a bit faulty, of course. It was probably the compost heap.
Isla is only three months old, and is obviously not yet into things. I will be doing everything I can to properly child-proof the house (apparently, “childproofing” didn’t exist in the 1970s.) But I hope I have at least as much patience as my parents had with me. Especially when she decides to wake up at 3AM and start pouring baby lotion into the stove for no discernible reason. Yeah, I actually did that.
Geez, I’d better be patient, ‘cuz I don’t believe you’re allowed to keep children in the garden any more.
