Murphy's Law: The Toddler Version

A funny little example of how "what can go wrong, will go wrong" can often does apply when you have a toddler around.

Once you become a parent, there is no allowance for turning off your brain. Even on the weekend. . .



A while back, I had a couple of sponge brushes laying out on the dining room table. I had just finished stencilling the dining area wall. I had packed away the paint and other stencilling equipment immediately, because I knew that leaving them out was just asking for trouble. I figured the brushes alone would be fine though. Besides, they needed to dry after being washed anyway.

Can't make a mess with these if there is no paint right?

The next day was a Saturday. That morning, I had some errands to run, so hubby was going to stay home with the kids while I went out. I noticed a yogurt parfait in the fridge that was going to go bad if not eaten. I told hubby to feed it to the kids along with lunch, and set it on the table so he couldn't miss it:

*Parfait probably not to scale

When I got home, I walked into the kitchen and noticed that the parfait was only half gone.

I immediately went into the living room and asked hubby why. Apparently, he had forgotten about the parfait all together and never even gave it to the kids. So the question became, what happened to half of the parfait. There were no eating utensils around, yet neither kid was messy so they couldn't have used their fingers.

Confused, I went back over to the dining area to figure it out, and upon second glance, it was very obvious what had happened:

The yogurt had become paint!

Upon questioning, it was discovered that Little Dude wanted to "help mommy paint wall". We couldn't really be mad at him since we I was the one to leave everything out this way (which *in retrospect*, was really dumb and obvious).

We also had never had a discussion with Little Dude about what was OK or not OK to draw/paint on. So, we took the opportunity to specify to him that he could only draw or paint on paper, and never on walls or anything else around the house. He repeated back to us, "Only dwaw on papew, nothing else. Oh, OK mommy daddy!" He seemed to understand so we left it at that and cleaned the wall.

A few hours later we were all hanging out in the living room. Little Dude was sitting at his table, drawing on a bunch of junk mail that I let him have. He is usually very neat and follows the rules so he is allowed to draw with pen - which, he was using this time around. He would draw and play on and off; We weren't paying particularly close attention. At one point I saw him scribbling furiously on a small piece of paper so I went to check out what he was doing. To my horror I found something like this:

This was a check that hubby had received from someone he had done some work for. It was a difficult check to replace. Little Dude had scribbled specifically over hubby's name and the check's account number (of course).

The smiley face must have been for good measure.

Little Dude smiled at me and repeated, "Only dwaw on papew, nothing else."

(O_O)

*PS - The banker lady very kindly accepted the check from me despite the scribbles because she could kind of make out the name, and the # on the bottom could be read electronically. Pretty sure she wasn't supposed to do that, but I was very grateful she did. Phew!

*PPS - Yes hubby and I both learned valuable lessons that day about just how much a 2 year old can get into.