“What made those holes?!”: Knife Stories, Things I’ve Had to Disinfect, and Other Tales of Things My Toddlers Accomplished in Five Minutes

Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.

There are sounds you come to know as a mom, sounds made by particular children in particular situations.

I sighed. I estimated that in the 15 seconds it had taken me to walk out the bathroom and down the hall to the linen closet for clean towels, Aidan and Roman had thrown most of the little plastic sharks and whales from the bathtub into the toilet. Good thing those sharks did well in the top rack of the dishwasher. Especially since I remembered noticing Roman had forgotten to flush the toilet from his pre-bath potty stop.

I thought it’d be fun to share some of the juicier slices of recent daily life with my two youngest children: three-year-old Roman and two-year-old Aidan. They are 15 months apart, and let me tell you…those two have been the making of me. I think thought I was something of an old pro at babies and toddlers after already having three kids, but #4 and #5 threw me for a loop. A hilarious loop, but a loop. I was blessed to put both boys this year in a Mother’s Day Out program three mornings per week, so it’s been a real adjustment having them home full time again during the quarantine.

I’m sure some of you could use a laugh right about now…or just need to know that you’re not the only one in the #ToddlersGoneWild club. So…enjoy.:)

Oh, and I’d love, love, love you to comment on this post with your funniest toddler disaster story. I need all the laughs I can get these days, too!

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If 15 seconds was enough for my toddlers to come up with a spectacularly gross mess for me to clean up, imagine what they can do in five minutes. (Oh, all of my “I was only gone five minutes!” stories.) The following anecdotes are mostly things my two youngest little boys did in five minutes of non-supervision.

Just this morning, Michael called me to the Office (our bedroom, during quarantine) to give me a quick update on something. I left all five kids playing fairly happily in the kitchen area. Five minutes later when I walked back in, Aidan was at the kitchen table diving into a package of raw ground beef he’d found in the refrigerator, and flinging bits of pink meat all over the table and floor.

(If I had a dollar for every time somebody has told me, “I bet you never yell”…)

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My ten-year-old had just brought the trashcan up from the street one morning, and the driveway gate was ajar. In the five-minute interim before I closed the gate, Aidan somehow escaped down our driveway on his balance bike, flew down the sidewalk to the house a couple of doors down, stole a shiny red tricycle from their carport, dumped his bike by their back door, drove the tricycle back to our house, went up the driveway, and rode right into our living room through the back door.

Michael and I spent all day trying to figure out where he’d gotten the red tricycle and where the balance bike had gone.

All the neighbors know we’re that family, though. It’s cool.

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I was trying to get dinner prepped one night, and suddenly I couldn’t find the paring knife I’d been using to slice up some vegetables. I was in such a rush, and the kitchen was such a disaster, that I just grabbed another knife and kept going without looking too hard for it. A few minutes later, though, I realized I hadn’t heard Aidan for a little while. My Mom Alert Sensors started going off, and I stopped chopping carrots to jog around the corner and scan the living room for Aidan.

I froze in horror: He was standing on the outside of the pack n’ play I keep in the living room. His eyes were filled with glee at an infinitely satisfying new game: stabbing the netting of the pack n’ play over and over with a paring knife.

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I was trying to get everyone settled down at the table for dinner recently when I noticed Aidan was missing (again). Above the commotion at the table, I heard the sound of splashing, but it was the dread-inducing sound of accompanying giggles that made me stop in my tracks. Aidan had grabbed a dirty sock from the laundry pile in front of the washer and was dunking it in the dog’s water bowl, then flinging stinky, slobbery dog water all over the walls, window and ceiling in his immediate vicinity.

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I guess I do have a lot of Aidan stories.

I think it’s because #5 just slips under the radar sometimes in a big family…or because his name means “little fire” (what was I thinking?) and he was sent to keep me hopping.

Back to another Aidan story. He loves butter. I found him one afternoon recently eating a stick of butter like a popsicle. He’d stolen it out of the pullout drawer of our refrigerator (I will never buy one of those again while I have toddlers, unless it comes with a keypad lock or something).

I wasn’t surprised though. If we have butter on the table for a meal, he wants a big chunk of it on his plate. Straight cream cheese on bagel day is also acceptable. Also, he eats sour cream with a spoon like yogurt if we let him. He does love yogurt. I haven’t let him try mayo. I guess he could have worse food addictions.

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I call this story Poopocalypse..and this is actually Roman’s story. I hope he doesn’t hate me in ten years that I posted this on the Internet. He was still only two at the time.

It was 6:45am on a weekday morning. I walked out of my bedroom and immediately smelled poop. The toddlers’ bedroom door was open. Blearily I stumbled over to the kids’ bathroom and found Roman trying to finish taking off his pullup himself. It took me a while to clean up both him and the bathroom. But then I stepped out of the bathroom…and into a slippery pile of something on the floor. It was then that I realized…the scope. Cue the horror movie music. There was poop on the walls, the floor, and also the living room carpet. Most of it blended in conveniently with our dark brown stained concrete floors. Later, I had to get on my hands and knees like a bloodhound to sniff out every stray spot of poop that had been tracked on my dark living room carpet.

Not my favorite way to start the day. I asked Michael to bring home takeout for dinner.

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Speaking of my favorite way to start off the day, we had a wet n’ wild morning recently, also thanks to Roman. Michael had had bone surgery for a broken arm the day before, and I’d been up in the night with several night-waking children plus waking Mike every four hours to take pain medication. I’d slept in a few extra minutes while the kids all watched a mom-approved show in the living room. (I am thankful they’re all still at ages where the big kids still don’t mind watching baby shows if needed.)

When I walked out of my room, though, I found my kitchen flooded with a quarter-inch of water. Roman had pulled a chair up to the sink, turned on the faucet, and had sprayed most of the kitchen ceiling, cabinets, and countertops in addition to the floor. I think Michael and I used every single towel in the house to clean it up.

I for one couldn’t believe four other children were so engrossed in PJ Masks that they hadn’t noticed their little brother flooding the kitchen. Our family meeting later with the big kids (6, 8 and 10) went something like this: “Big Kids: we NEED you. In the future–this is a life lesson–ACTUALLY WE’RE MAKING THIS A FAMILY RULE–if you hear water running, for goodness sake STOP WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING AND GO LOOK INTO IT.”

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I was running late one morning, and was rushing to get the kids loaded up in our 12-passenger van. The van is so big that the kids often get in from the very back as well as the side. I thought I finally had everybody in seatbelts before I noticed that Aidan was missing. I immediately knew he was down the street (that would be just like him, trust me). But a quick scan up and down the street didn’t yield a fleeing toddler. So I ran back into the house, calling his name. No answer. Then, I spotted him through the living room windows. He was standing in the middle of the bridge on our big playset, holding a bottle of glass cleaner that hadn’t been put away after some cleaning we’d done that morning. And he was spraying as much as his little fingers possibly could, grinning ear to ear.

I ran outside and sternly ordered him to stop spraying the glass cleaner and to come down the slide so we could leave. He obediently (for once) dropped the glass cleaner bottle over the side of the fence. A split second before he did that, I had noticed a pile of fresh dog poop right under the bridge…

Oh yes, you guessed it. Have you ever disinfected a bottle of glass cleaner?

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I was sitting in the backyard one day while the kids played, enjoying the beautiful spring afternoon. I kept hearing a buzzing sound. It didn’t sound like bees, though. But it did get louder and then softer at different points…I was still guessing what the sound could be when Aidan zoomed through the grass in front of me, his dirty, chubby feet pedaling furiously underneath his favorite car. I saw stuck in the trunk of the car were two of his older siblings’ electric toothbrushes, buzzing merrily away.

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I had been wearing my long hair straight one day, and by mid-afternoon couldn’t take the Louisiana heat anymore. Instead of running all the way back to my own bathroom for a hair tie, I ducked my head into the darkened kids’ bathroom, fished around for one from the top drawer, and threw my hair in a messy top knot. That night at dinner, I happened to reach up to adjust my bun, and I felt something gooey and sticky in my hair. Turns out, it was a big glob of toothpaste that had come as a package deal all over the hair tie. When I checked the kids’ bathroom drawer later, someone had made a great time squeezing toothpaste all over the drawer.

I didn’t wonder who.

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One afternoon last week, I noticed two toy trucks, a calculator, a turkey baster, an empty jelly jar, a water bottle, and the top of the peanut butter jar tossed into the left-hand side of the kitchen sink.

I was chuckling to myself and starting to put each item away when I heard Michael calling from the backyard.

He had just found Aidan marching around stark naked in the backyard eating peanut butter out of the jar with a butter knife. Our big Great Pyrenees/Labrador puppy, Annabelle, was trailing him closely.

Michael told me Aidan was occasionally letting her have a lick, too.