This Monday I bring you one of my most startling moments as a young mother. And a warning. A warning never to fall asleep on the job. Not for one minute. Don’t pee with the door closed either. Not if you have a cabinet-lock kid. As I have described in “Some Kids Don’t Do Flashcards”, my firstborn was non-stop action. One time, the babysitter didn’t know the “don’t close the bathroom door when peeing” rule and when she came out of the bathroom, he was gone. Gone as in, in the yard, about to explore the neighborhood gone. On another occasion, he got outside, got into our van, got in the driver’s seat and put it in reverse. He sailed down the inclined driveway and came to a halt just at the edge of the neighbor’s yard. I thought all kids were like that and had mad respect for women with more than one child.
Then I got pregnant with my own second baby when Russell was 15 months old and immediately had mad respect for myself. I was sick for the whole first 12 weeks. All I wanted to do was lay on the couch and the only way that was possible was if our one and only Veggie Tale video, “Josh And The Big Wall” was playing. I swear to you, to this day, if I hear “Keep Walking” I experience a legitimate wave of nausea. Mamas, you know the drill. If you are one of the chosen few who can keep even some food down and get up in the mornings for those 12 weeks, you try to be a good mom to a human in one of it’s neediest forms while also trying not to puke on it. You make the snacks, change the (gag) diapers, play with the toys and read the stories. You dash off to toss your cookies every once in a while but never with the door closed. You eagerly await naptime. Naptime is now a requirement for your own survival. If you can have a nap, you might be able to make it all the way to bath time.
But cabinet-lock kids don’t always nap. It’s hit or miss with them. They play hard and they sleep hard. They may choose to cooperate with your nap time agenda. They may just fall asleep in the middle of the living room floor with duplos still clutched in their little hands. Or (shudder) they may not sleep at all. Such was the case on this ill-fated afternoon. I had tried to get Russell to cooperate with my nap agenda and he was simply bored by the idea. I did all the right stuff. I put him in his crib, sang him a song, gave him a pacifier and backed slowly out of the room. Nope. Not for thirty more minutes of cajoling would Russell take a nap. But I needed a nap, and dammit, we were going to have one.
I got him from his crib and took him to my bed with me. I explained that he could lay down with Mama and we were going to have naptime together. He sat there on the bed beside me while I assumed the position and that’s the last thing I remember about that. An undetermined amount of time passed and I remember being sucked back to consciousness by his little voice. You know that kind of slow “who am I, where am I, what is life” kind of waking up? That’s what I was doing while being pulled to the surface by this word. “Buddoo? Buddoo?…Buddoo?” What? What is a Buddoo? Who is saying that? What do they mean? Oh, it’s a baby. It’s saying Buddoo. Oh, that’s my baby. What does he want? Why is he still saying Buddoo? Blink blink.
There was Russell, standing by the side of the bed. As he came into focus I could see that he was shiny all over. He was not wearing the clothes he had been wearing at our joint naptime appointment. In fact, he was wearing nothing but a diaper and his cowboy boots. And he was so slick that he looked soaking wet. What the heck? I reached out to touch his arm and realized that this was not water. “Buddoo?” “Russell, what do you mean, Buddoo? Show Mama.” He raced down the hall to the kitchen. I followed anxiously behind him. When I arrived at the kitchen he was standing in the middle of the shiny floor with his shiny body in his shiny boots with both palms up and still saying, “Buddoo?” Buddoo? Ohhhhhhh…..butter? This was butter. It was smashed into the kitchen floor with a thoroughness only a cabinet-kid can dish out. I just stood there staring at him, trying to understand.
The best I can surmise, this is what happened. I was too in need of that nap to remember to shut my bedroom door all the way and engage the door knob lock to contain the occupants. I am certain, by the thoroughness of the job done, that he escaped quite immediately after arriving in my room. Here’s where my story is open to speculation and I wish I had a hidden camera to understand the sequence of events. Did he wander into the kitchen, see the stick of butter in the butter dish on the counter and then make a plan? Or did he go to his bedroom, disrobe put on his favorite boots and set out on a mission, looking for things to stomp? Whatever the order of events, his clothes came off and his boots came on. He took the butter from the counter (I still don’t know how he could even reach it) and smashed and stomped it into the kitchen floor. He may also have done some finger-paint style buttering as his whole body was covered in a layer of butter.
This may have made some Moms mad but not me. How could I be mad at a super-spy 15 month old baby who was smart enough to 1) put on his own cowboy boots 2) was interested in furthering his finger-painting skills and 3) knew what “buddoo” was. I just sat down on the floor beside his baby-wrestler greased self and cracked up. Truly, in light of all of the possibilities of things that Russell could do while unsupervised for any amount of time, I felt relieved that this was all that happened. The boot buttering preserved those little kicks for the three other kids and I got a nap.
Let’s all raise our glasses to the moms who have the great privilege of raising cabinet-lock kids. Cheers to you, ladies! Here’s to you keeping them alive, here’s to boots and butter and here’s to…naps. Worth it.
