“Mommy, I can’t get this stuff off”

Those are the words we woke up to yesterday. Actually, it wasn’t the first time we opened our eyes in the early morning hours on Saturday. We woke up to Keenan jumping out of bed and quietly (or so he thought) slipping down the stairs. At one point we woke up to his power tools and some hammering sounds. Then he was calling to us “Mommy, daddy I can’t get it open” and we replied “ok, bring it up here” and then we dozed off again. Some immeasurable amount of time later Keenan was resting his elbows on my side of the bed and showing me his hands which were covered in some sort white, blobby, obviously terribly sticky, unknown substance. “Mommy, I can’t get this stuff off”. It covered his hands and had actually sealed the sleeves of his pajamas to his arms. The vein on Sean’s temple bulged as he launched into his regular line of questioning; “what have you been into?”, “what did you do?”, “where did you get that?” and last but not least “did you put any of that in your mouth?”. I think Keenan’s reply was a single “no” which furthers my belief that kids really only remember either the very beginning or the very end of any kind of lecture so may as well get it over with quickly since all that middle crap is basically just for you any ways. Sean jumped up and grabbed the child to discover his feet had trances of the same stuff. I’m thinking....gluestick, white glue, lard? None of which are toxic in this household so by my calculations we were just looking at disaster control not an emergency hospital visit before coffee and brushing our teeth. After Sean’s frustrating attempt to get the stuff off with cold water I took over (the vein was now visibly throbbing to the tempo of Sean’s heartbeat) and ran a warm bath with lots of bubbles for Mr. Messy. Sean went downstairs to assess the potential damage while I peeled the jammies off the kid. Somehow I got the stuff in my mouth and realized it had a sweet, lemony taste, not unlike the homemade marshmallows Sharon made for us last weekend! I called down to inform Sean as he CSI’d the main floor. There he found marshmallow smeared on pretty much all the furniture in the living room and dining room. Yes, there was cursing.

So here’s what happened. My sister brought me me a bag of books that I borrowed yet forgot at her place last weekend. It was my birthday last weekend so Jose had us and some friends and family over. Sharon and Paul came and Sharon brought us all her lovely homemade lemon flavoured marshmallows some of which were placed in the bag of books and forgotten until keen eyed Keenan spotted the only new thing in his environment yesterday morning, the bag of books. He went investigating and found the bag of marshmallows. I’m assuming he couldn’t get the twist tie off and that was what he was calling to us about. He likely got the marshmallows all squishy by trying to get it off and voila he had himself instant stickiness! Lord only knows how much he ate! Sean tells me it appears Keenan had tried to clean up his smeared mess (read: budding conscience) by using all the small towels from the drawer in the kitchen. I can only imagine his surprise as they couldn’t clean it up but somehow managed to stick to his hands each time he used another and another. I would pay serious money for that footage if it existed! Anyhow it all ended with us finally out of bed and a clean, unharmed child. The sticky bits we occasionally find on our socks are just sweet (literally) reminders of another failed attempt at at sleeping in.