Friday, September 23, 2005

OVERRATED

This motherhood thing is overrated. Sure The Girl is all cute and witty and squishable and smarter than a border collie, but really folks, it's overrated. Take for example yesterday...
I was quietly enjoying (first red flag) my latest issue of Sports Illustrated while The Girl was playing and coloring in her room. Three minutes later she starts yelling, "I'm washing my hands," over and over (second red flag). I assume (third red flag) she has a couple of baby wipes and is in fact washing her hands. About a minute later it is VERY quiet (fourth red flag), then the "washing my hands" rant starts again (fifth red flag). At this point I realize that Sports Illustrated has been interfering with my mom-radar aka MOMDAR, so I head into her room to find...ugh...this can't be good. Grace was on her changing table sticking her hand into a jar of Vaseline. Apparently she had been "washing" her hands with petroleum jelly. It covered both hands, was smeared on her arms, legs and face, as well as the wood rail around the changing table, a 2'x2' section of the wall, and most seriously - her hair. I grabbed an old receiving blanket and started wiping everything in site. After a quick assessment of her new greaser hairdo we went to the bath. Two shampooings with her Loreal Kids mango shampoo should fix that right up. Um, no. A couple hours later I try two shampooings with grown-up shampoo. Better? Um, no.
Turning to the greatest motherhood resource ever - Google - I found out that corn starch should be applied to absorb it, then shampooed out. We waited till this morning to try that method. A quarter cup of corn starch (bakers know that's A LOT) massaged in scalp to ends and two shampoos with potentially-eye-irritating grown-up shampoo. Better? Um, a bit. Not like a greaser anymore, just like a kid who hasn't had her hair washed in three days. Looks like we might do a corn starch do-over before tonight's bath, too.
In the meantime, it's off to the park for our standing Friday playdate. All the other moms will love hearing this story so they can roll their eyes and then say, "You think that's bad, my kid put blah-blah all over blah-blah-blah."
Again I say, motherhood is overrated. And did I mention I forgot to turn my camera off yesterday, hence a dead battery, hence no pictures of this debacle? Overrated indeed.

At least she has well-moisturized skin.

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