My 2-year-old daughter loves to “help” around the house. She just recently learned how to accurately pour “tea” (it’s water) into a cup and loves the fact that she can now contribute to our meal preparation. When mealtime is over she’s right back in the kitchen offering to “help” with the clean up. Her official job is dishwasher (believe me, our Kenmore is not complaining). I fill a large Rubbermaid tub with soapy water and put her plastic Elmo dishes in it. She stands on a chair next to the sink and washes while I clean the rest of the kitchen. It has become our nightly routine and has gone smoothly… until tonight.
I haven’t looked outside, but given what just happened in the kitchen my guess is that there’s a full moon out there. Our meal was a simple one, angel hair pasta with mushrooms covered with tomato sauce. Unfortunately, I got so engrossed with helping my daughter arrange broccoli florets that I forgot to put the lid on the saucepan. When I returned to the stove there was red sauce EVERYWHERE. (I also forgot to lower the heat.) It looked like a red sauce bomb exploded and nothing was spared. The toaster, walls, refrigerator, stove, utensils, spice rack; they all looked like they had come down with a bad case of the measles.
I left the mess and wolfed down dinner (I was anxious to get back into the kitchen and fully assess the scope of the splattering). I had just grabbed the Windex when “Mommy’s Little Helper” appeared and made it clear that I could not possibly get the job done without her. Fast forward to the scene of her standing at the sink “washing” the Elmo dishes. The phone rings, I answer (it’s my mom) and begin relaying the aforementioned sauce story to her, at that precise moment, out of the corner of my eye I see my plastic watering can (used to douse indoor plants) being raised above my toddler daughter’s head, before I could drop the phone and intercept the can, it happened. A shower (make that a deluge) of water soaks my daughter, the floor, and the counter. The residual water then seeps under the blender, microwave and coffee maker. I am then left with a screaming child, spotted appliances, countertops underwater, and a small pond on my kitchen floor. The screaming child was taken to the bathtub and later put to bed. The kitchen got a thorough cleaning the likes of which it hasn’t seen in months.
The moral of this story: Mommy’s Little Helper’s big accident helped spark a HUGE cleaning effort (which for me is a major accomplishment)… I’ll have to thank her in the morning.