I realised the other day how long it’s been since I last reported on an Ian exploit, and believe me, it’s not because they suddenly stopped.
Intertwined with the everyday mundane are sequences of events that generally go un-noticed. Or perhaps they’re so frequent that it’s become so common place. Either way, there are special days where the exploit is so ginormous, it’s impossible to overlook or even justify. It makes life interesting. Or maybe it just makes grey hair.
[As a foreword, this home is a “new build”. Everything is new. We signed on it just as the inside was being completed. We didn’t have a choice in anything, the paint, carpet and laminate flooring, all the fixtures and doors were already planned. But despite that, I really like the house, even though we have lost some living space moving here.]
I think I can safely say, Ian has “christened” our new home. We won’t mention how he managed to remove the glass door from the front of my entertainment centre and break off the tiny attachment pieces, or how he spilled a huge blob of purple acrylic paint on my 6-month old carpet. We’ll keep quiet about how when he was playing with his Matchbox areoplane he let it “fly” and it careened into my double-glazed (paned) 8-day old window and spread a hairline crack across the length of it (goodbye $106).
We’ll ignore how he managed to snap a wheel off one of the fruit and veg drawers in my (4 month old, french door, $1300) fridge because he was leaning in to get some grapes. Or then there’s the time he played with the tubing on my $200 breast pump and snapped a valve on it. Or how he stood in the pullout drawer under Cameron’s $300 Pali cot (crib) and bent the runners. He has expensive taste, like his mother. Then there was the day last week where he decided to clean out his potty with Cameron’s bath sponge.
Somehow I can deal with all that (well, I can NOW). What’s much more difficult to understand and accept is Cameron’s abuse. I’ve decided to call it abuse.
A few days after Ian and Bryan and I got really sick, Cameron had really bad diarrhea, and it never stopped. There was no temperature, no weight loss, no crankiness – nothing. Finally after almost 2½ months of it, I spoke to a nurse at his new doctor’s office. She casually said, “it may be something you’re eating. Some babies are sensitive to spicy food, broccoli, onions and chocolate.”
I’d thought about that, but the only symptom he’d had with me eating onions – and beans for that matter – was bad gas.
So I watched what I ate and continued to down a glass of Nesquik every day. (You can see where this is going already, can’t you?)
The mess up the back continued and the daily changing was getting old. Some days I’d have to change his outfit twice when we were out.
Then one day I noticed he didn’t have a blow out. Finally! They’re gone. No, not really, just a false sense of security.
I hadn’t had my chocolate milk that day, and when I realised that, I refused to admit my little one could have a sensitivity to chocolate. Why would he do that to me, his mother?
Well, he did. And he does.
So as it stands, I am currently banned from all things chocolate and suddenly wishing he should have just picked broccoli instead. Suddenly, a faint washed-out lilac stain on the beige carpet the size of a small cat doesn’t seem so bad now.
a Brit different 