So, the title of this blog comes about because this phrase is in my thoughts MULTIPLE times a day as I am at home with our now almost 15 month old, Hadley.
I had forgotten how, when you have a baby this age (and yes, folks, she IS still a baby), you have to calculate the satisfaction of actually completing some sort of task (folding laundry, loading the dishwasher, checking e-mail, taking a shower) versus the destruction that you will be responsible for picking up as the little one in your life entertains herself while you are completing the aforementioned task.
Hadley learns more about her world by tasting it. Most everything she touches goes directly into her mouth...not to be swallowed, but to be licked as she tastes it and tries to decide if it's actually worth eating. The good news: I don't worry much about her choking. The bad news: As she investigates the world around her, I fear that she will ingest something that she shouldn't.
Take this morning, for example...as I was in the shower, Hadley sorted through our bathroom cabinets. She has a special affinity for Brandon's cologne bottle. At one point, I gazed out through the shower door to see her sucking on the cologne spray nozzle. She then moved on to my hairspray bottle. I caught her before she could remove the top off of that. While I was getting dressed after my shower, she dumped an entire bin of my toiletries on the floor, whined because she wanted some lotion...so we applied some lotion together, I quickly picked up the toiletries, and we were off and running. As we were going downstairs, I noted that she had hauled out a few of her favorite playthings from Kylee's room...so I picked those up and then saw that she had also spread her board books from her own room here, there, and everywhere...so those got picked up, too. All the price for taking a shower.
In the meantime, Hadley had made it downstairs. She dumped out a baggie of Play-Dough supplies, got into the tupperware cabinet...I caught her just before she dove into the cabinet with the cleaning supplies in it. It is not uncommon for me, at some point in our daily routine, to catch her licking a dog toy. It's life as we know it.
I realized, as I was handing our daughter a Twix candy bar from the Halloween bowl at 10:00 am just to busy her long enough for me to check my e-mail, that I feel like a member of a movie crew....the one who is responsible for resetting the stage 200 times a day so that the shoot can continue on. Then, I also envisioned myself receiving the "mother of the year" award for feeding my little one chocolate before noon.
I had forgotten that in this stage of childhood, it truly is a MAJOR accomplishment to keep a child safe and focused on the non-toxic items in the house. Is it a good thing that I determine how I do things using the question "Is what she's licking going to hurt her, or if it's not toxic and I let her keep licking it, will it occupy her for long enough that I can fold this load of laundry?"
