Here’s one of those things you kind of know when you have a toddler: too much quiet, that’s a suspicious thing.
So, during the few minutes I was focused upon making lunch (did you know that if you grate cheese and melt it and put it on a tortilla, it goes from suspect maybe-I-don’t-like-melted-cheese-sandwich to quesadilla? Seriously, language is genius, and so are tortillas) when I realized my calling out to Saskia ceased to be met by a response. She’s intrepid, so I did check the doors to outside first. If she feels like a tricycle ride, then, well, baby, she may conveniently forget she’s supposed to have a grown-up in tow. That’s such a cumbersome requirement. For Saskia, at times, toddlerhood is cumbersome, all that napping and diaper changing and adult accompaniment.
I walked through every room downstairs. My heart was not beating quicker as I went upstairs. I was expecting to find her in my room, her brothers’ room or the shower stall (a very fun place, it turns out, according to Saskia). When I did not find her upstairs, my heart picked up a notch or two.
As I was coming downstairs, Ezekiel called out to hurry. He’d found her. He’d found her in the corner behind the playroom door. I’d called out for her when I checked the playroom, the bathroom next-door and my study, but she’d remained silent and the door was open, the spot behind the playroom door so small I thought to myself no one would be sitting there, which was untrue. She was there, painting the floor purple. It was finger paint, after all.
I scooped her up from behind, ferried her to the sink and got her hands under the faucet. We watched the water turn violet. “I was painting!” she protested. Paint goes on paper, I reminded her.
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Now, there’s an infamous story from my childhood that has to do with my mother driving to get me at the ice skating rink—a ways away—and leaving my little sister and her best friend, the back-door neighbor, on their own—they were probably a tad bit young to be left alone for an actual period of time, but this—as we just noted—can happen fast, this painting thing. Well, my sister and her friend decided the floor in her room was kind of boring. Paint it black, no relation to the Stones’ song.
Painting the floor was itself a mess, but then the duo pattered with their black feet and hands down the stairs—three flights, carpeted—and also attempted to wash the paint off, all over the white towels and had semi-black hands trail the wallpaper and banisters. What we returned home to was, let’s just say, a really impressive household-wide blackish extravaganza.
Along with the story of my sister and her friend accidentally stabbing the goldfish with a toy fork—a story that for many years before having kids I could not tell without laughing hysterically—it’s pretty much one of Remy’s favorite funny stories, the black paint on the floor story. We had a years-long tradition of sharing a funny story and three good thoughts at bedtime. I have told and retold the funny stories.
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As it goes with a fourth child, any attempts at mustering sternness when something is funny goes out the window, even if that funny thing came about because of a toddler transgression. I snapped evidentiary photos and as I went to put the camera down before washing the evidence off the floor, I crossed paths with Ezekiel, looking for the camera. “Oh, phew, you got it,” he said. Remy had been midsentence—“You have to blog about this” was Remy’s suggestion—when Ezekiel chimed in. Turns out, discipline is not really a family affair. Turns out, laughter and blogging are.
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PS: My blog is running in the top 20 for the Babble readers’ poll (Best Mom Blog). It’s shameless (even if it makes me feel pretty bashful) self-promotion, but if you wouldn’t mind voting for Standing in the Shadows, I’d be much obliged.
