Monday

Jack had a major blow-out in his crib this morning. It was not lovely. It was smeared everywhere, even on his arms and face, and he had a huge glob stuck on his back, right above his pajama pants. He was grinning like a cheese grit, and somehow managed to look cute in spite of the smelly poo. I had to hold him over the toilet and wipe him down before I could stick him in the tub, and then I had to wash him off before I could draw the bath water. He had nearly gone artistic on me in his crib. It was on the sheet, the blanket and the crib rails. He had pulled down the dangling metal toucan from his mobile, an accomplishment he was quite proud of, but it was a little messy, and all I could think about was cleaning brownie batter out of beaters. The clean up got to me after a while; I threw away an almost-new cardboard book, and I am intensely practical.

The morning continued in its busyness, I got engrossed in my sewing, the household clutter and dirt began to get out of control, and that’s when the vacuum cleaner salesman showed up to clean and service the Electrolux. Man, were those gross sticky streaks on my kitchen floor ever humbling. And it continued to get humbling. Especially when he pulled out an air particle sensor/tester/thingamabob and showed me that we have 21,300 or more icky particles per cubic foot floating around in our lovely indoor air. “Any of your kids have allergies?” he asked. Not really, I said, but then I had to think about the $85 we had just shelled out for a teeny bottle of allergy drops for Owen, whose eyes had been gunking up for over a week. He explained about all the junk that’s in dirty, unfiltered air, air that hasn’t been zapped by the Aerus Electrolux purifier’s UV light, which by the way, is $1199.99 plus tax, and we can arrange that in 6 monthly payments: aerosol cans (which I don’t use), hairspray (which I don’t use but maybe I need to?), air freshener (which I don’t use often), the glue used for carpet padding (we’ve got that in the basement), dust mites in mattresses because we shed a pound of skin a year (gross!!), ad infinitum. The bad part of me had to wonder if his little machine would have sensed the air particles in Jack’s room earlier. And hey, I’m not defending the wholesomeness of our air, but I am a little skeptical of a salesman’s biased evaluation, even a nice salesman, which he was.

I do think the funniest moment, apart from Jack grabbing onto the man’s rear while he was putting the sweeper back together, was Owen’s comment about the Vaseline he was using to grease a part of the vacuum: “Hey, that’s for my pee-pee!” (He felt perfectly fine about talking about his rash to a perfect stranger. I can see we have some work to do.) Sometimes I am extremely glad people have a hard time understanding Owen.