Sunday, July 1, 2007

For The Love of Dove

Don't worry. We're not wading through standing flood waters in our galoshes. We haven't been affected by all of the Texas flooding you've been hearing about on the national news (knock, knock, knock on wood,) but it has been rainy. No, Rainy! (capital "R" and exclamation; that much rain.) We're feverishly searching for ways to stave off cabin fever and boredom. We make twice weekly trips to the library. We bake.


(H insists on wearing that white kitchen towel over his shoulder for the duration of the preparations.)

And we play tag in the aisles of our favorite retail locale--Target! It's always been a favorite stomp for me, so you can imagine my delight when the first words out of H's mouth on Friday morning, when I asked him what we should do that day, were, "Shu-we go to Target, mama...Shu-we?" Like a good mama, I obliged.

We needed a can opener anyway. I don't know what it is with us and can openers, but we've gone through one in each of our years of marriage. They all cease to function after about twelve months' time and so (finally,) we adopted the "Buy Nice or Buy Twice" motto and purchased a cherry red Kitchen Aid can opener that's almost as big as my head. I think I experienced some mild cardiac angina contemplating the big, full-priced, top of the Target line, purchase. But I experienced some severe cardiac complications when H lifted the about-to-be-purchased-can-opener above his head and dropped it (from the height of the cart's seat,) onto the tile floor of the Housewares aisle. The handle came unglued. And so did I. Tears. Heavy nostril breathing. Biting of tongue. I almost walked back to the shelf and stealthily replaced it, not wanting to have to cough up the cash for a useless kitchen gadget, and figuring no one would know that it was a toddler's antics and not just faulty manufacturing that caused the fracture. Almost. But my conscience got the better of me and I asked the nearest clerk what the house policy about broken merchandise was...lucky for me, (and for H,) we didn't have to pay for the tragedy. Ma'am RedShirt at the local Target has no idea how wise she was to extend such mercy--those kinds of experiences make a loyal customer out of people like me, so I'm sure they'll more than make the money back over my many coming years of pledged patronage.

In fact, I may need to make a trip this week to replenish my Dove Body Wash supply, as I am unexpectedly out. You'll never believe what happened to mine. I was actually jotting down some thoughts for this post, just after I had put H in his room for a nap this afternoon, when I started detecting increasingly more noticeable whiffs of what smelled like fragrant lotion. I followed my sniffer to the door of H's room and braced myself for what I might find. Here's what I saw:

And if I could rig up a sound byte, you'd hear a giggly little two-year old voice saying, "Dis is FUN, mom! It is!"

Apparently he snuck out of his room, opened up the hall closet, pulled a nearly-full, sixteen ounce bottle of Dove Bodywash from the shelf, and went back into his room. Like a good little mischief maker, he even thought to close the bedroom door behind him. Then he went to work, squirting and slathering. There was probably a half-inch of lathered soap on his head when I found him. His legs were frosted. His clothes were glazed. The carpet was splattered with squirts of thick, creamy, strong-smelling soap, which soap was impossible to extract from the fibers of said carpet. Before long, it was in his eyes (ouch!) all over my (church) clothes, and traipsed in footprinted smudges through a well-worn traffic pattern from bedroom to bath. It's such a paradox that someone so clean could be such a mess. And that soap, which usually comes in handy to repair the ravages of two year old curiosity, was actually the cause of the most problematic mess I've been faced with thus far. His room still wreaks so heavily of Dove that he's sleeping in our bed, to mitigate the risk of asphyxiation.

Never a dull moment, folks. Never a dull moment! I'm just slightly concerned that this enormous capacity for curiosity and creativity (?) may be the very force which inspires mail-box-bomb building, and excrement-lighting antics on the porch steps of unsuspecting, bath-robe clad neighbors, in his adolescence. It can be channeled into things more positive than asinine adolescent pranks, right? RIGHT?
But, of course, I still maintain that for the most part, H is very dear. The other night, when I went to get him out of the bath, he had slicked his hair all over to one side of his head, and, apparently pleased with his handi-work, said, "Look mom! I gorgeous! I look gorgeous, Mama."

You were gorgeous, H. And the craziest thing of it all is that through this mom's eyes, you were gorgeous with Dove bodywash lathered an inch above your head, and you were gorgeous the very next nanosecond after you dropped the premium-priced can-opener to its premature death at Target. But you're especially gorgeous to me right now, sound asleep on the pillow next to mine. I don't think I could find a more gorgeous sight than my sleeping child if I traveled the whole universe in pursuit.

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