How Pinterest Can Save (and Ruin) an Evening

Hello.  My name is Rebecca, and I'm addicted to Pinterest.

The other day my sister-in-law posted on her blog about a fun activity she did with my sweet niece, and it made me giggle.  Because I had a VERY different experience with the exact same activity just a few months ago.  One evening last December, while Brandon was in Tokyo, I thought I'd give the kids something fun to do.  I had been perusing the wildly addictive website, Pinterest, and found a recipe for something called "cloud dough"  (8 c. flour/1 c. baby oil).  It smelled great and was fun to play with.  I saw that the kids were enjoying the experience, too, so I felt okay about walking across the room and getting on the computer...to waste more time on...Pinterest. 

Then I heard Seth squawking.  The thing about Seth is that he's generally not a noisy kind of kid, so when I heard him squawk, I knew I needed to check him out.  I turned around, and he was covered in cloud dough.  Sighing, I pulled myself away from the computer.  It was off to the bathtub for Seth!  

While Seth was happily bathing, Nicholas and Renae started making some happy giggling sounds of their own in the other room.  This is preferable to the sibling squabbles I'm used to hearing, so I didn't think much of it.  Then I heard words like "snowing" and "snowball" coming from the dining room.  I peeked around into the dining room (the bathroom looks into the dining room across the hall, so I should have been monitoring the situation the whole time!).  Nicholas and Renae were having a "snowball fight" with the cloud dough.  Oh, joy!  I quickly picked Seth up out of the tub, wrapped him in a towel, and carried him off into the dining room/living room.  

I wish I'd taken better photos because these photos don't come close
to accurately portraying the amount of flour all over the place.  Brandon had
our camera in Tokyo, though, so I only had my phone to work with.

Nicholas and Renae were now covered in cloud dough, so it was off to the bathtub for them!  They can generally watch themselves in the tub if I'm in the next room, so I let them go hop in while I tended to Seth.  I dried him off, but then I realized that, being the fast crawler that he is, I should probably sweep up the flour before he could crawl through it.  So I left him WITHOUT A DIAPER ON to go sweep the floor.  (Stupid, stupid, stupid!)

Somehow Nicholas and Renae managed to get the flour into every corner, nook, crack, etc in the dining room, and I knew I had a bit of sweeping ahead of me.  I cleared the main path I figured Seth would be taking, and he managed to crawl past me towards the bathroom without getting any flour on his newly-cleaned body.  Inwardly, I was congratulating myself on my brilliant strategy.  I continued to sweep while Seth stood next to the bathtub chattering away at the kids.

Less than a minute later, I heard Nicholas exclaim in a combination shriek/giggle, "Seth is pooping on the floor...and he's stepping in it!"  I ran in there to find that Seth had essentially "skated" (forgive the imagery here) across the floor on his hands and knees in the "stuff."  Sooo, it was back into the tub for him!

As soon as he was back in the tub, Nicholas and Renae started screaming and jumping OUT of the tub.  Apparently they have an aversion to bathing in poopy water.  I can't really blame them, though.  I wouldn't want to, either.  However, by jumping out of the bathtub, they simultaneously brought a ton of water out of the tub with them AND mixed said water with the "stuff."  And then walked through it into the dining room where the cloud dough was still on the floor.  (Insert photo of me slapping my forehead.)

The only thing I could do at this point was to cut my losses, throw a towel on the nasty floor, drain the tub, order my wayward children back into it, and turn on the shower.  This was not a popular option with the kids, but I didn't much care at this point.  I had poopy water all over the floor in the bathroom, footprints of a similar consistency in the living room, only mixed with flour, and three kids in need of being cleaned.  I showered them and left them to play in the empty bathtub while I cleaned the bathroom floor and part of the dining room floor.

After I got them all dried and changed into clean pajamas, all I could do was call my mom and tell her this story.  I'm pretty sure I was crying and laughing at the same time as I related the events of the previous 20 minutes to her.

I'm sure there is a moral to the story, but it probably involves not spending so much time on Pinterest, so I'm going to ignore that part of the moral.  Instead, my take away from this experience is going to be 1) To not let Nicholas and Renae play with flour, unless I'm actually supervising them, 2) Seth is always to have a diaper on, and 3) It feels better to laugh than it does to cry (most of the time) in situations like this.