Not everything is as it seems.
One mother found this out the hard way recently when she received a very special present from her kids. Ashford Evans recounted this hysterical parenting anecdote on the website called For Every Mom:
“I opened the door and was greeted by deafening silence. Heavenly, rare, deafening silence.
It was one of those rare occasions where the hubs and I were ships passing in the night. I was returning home late from a business meeting, he had left in the early afternoon for a boys’ fishing trip. We had bartered and begged and delegated the children to different friends and family scattered throughout the town in order to cover the 6 hours in which neither of us would be in town. And so what I came home to after a long delayed flight and subsequent 2 hour drive from the airport was sweet sweet silence and an empty house.
Flickr/drbeachvacation
I took my time unloading my suitcase from the car as there was no one home to need anything (nay demand anything) from me immediately. I schlepped my suitcase into the bedroom and made my way to the half bath after drinking one too many Big Gulps on the way home.
When I entered the bathroom I was greeted by a sweet citrus smell. The entire bathroom seemed to have been scrubbed just before my arrival. I looked around astonished that my husband would think to clean the house just before my arrival (God knows how much I hate returning to a messy house) and that’s when I saw it.
Flickr/leplaza-brussels/
One of the children’s cereal bowls sitting on the shelf with what seemed to be an old bar of soap sitting in it. I didn’t remember buying grapefruit scented soap but it could’ve been from years ago. They have a tendency to dig up things long forgotten and put them on display for me.
It looked just like a bar of soap looks years after its prime. You know when it’s all dried up and misshapen? But it smelled delicious.
Flickr/paldies
I picked it up and held it to my nose breathing the scent in. The smell of fresh grapefruit in a perfectly silent house is just short of heaven I believe.
The thing was I just couldn’t quite place when I had bought fancy soap and just exactly where they had found it. Throughout the night I returned several times to inhale it’s tropical scent. In between making dinner and washing my face. I never bothered to wash my hands after fondling it because it was, afterall, just soap.
The next morning the spell had been broken as I left to collect all the children and return to my life of chaos and macaroni and cheese — leaving my grapefruit scented silence as a memory. It wasn’t long after we returned when Eeny emerged from the guest bathroom pressing the bar to her lips and breathing deeply saying ‘This is my favorite. I love the way this smells.’
‘I know!’ I wholeheartedly agreed. ‘What IS that? Where did you guys get that?’ I asked.
‘Meeny found it in the boys’ bathroom at Tae Kwon Do and brought it home,’ she happily replied.
And that’s when it hit me. It wasn’t some upscale boutique $15 soap I had been caressing for the last 12 hours. It was a urinal cake.
That’s right, catch your breath. An f-ing urinal cake. A URINAL CAKE!!!! A urinal cake from the public gym I take my 5 year old for Tae Kwon Do three times a week. A urinal cake that has been peed on by at least 1000 strange little boys that I just held against my cheek!!!!!
With this realization I screamed and jerked it from her hands flinging it into the trashcan.
‘NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!’ she cried bursting into tears. ‘It’s my FAVORITE!!!!!’
‘WASH YOUR HANDS, YOUR FACE, OH GOD WASH EVERYTHING!!!!!!’ I screamed back.
And everything went black.
Flickr/tuppaware
When I came to I realized I had only two options. As I went through my memory and all the things I had touched [eaten] since touching the vile thing I realized that in combination with all the things my kids had touched we really didn’t have much of a choice. I mean Tae Kwon Do is on Wednesdays and this was now Saturday!!!! This THING has touched basically everything in my house at this point.
So clearly our options were 1. Burn the house to the ground or 2. Pretend like it never happened and drink a bottle of wine [or two]. I’ll leave you guessing as to which I chose.
But either way here’s to kids being the most disgusting creatures ever to crawl the face of the earth and to teaching us some humility in the process.”
Flickr/basl
Almost all parents would agree that kids are great, but they’ll always be the first to admit that they can be pretty gross sometimes, too. This story is only one example of just how bad it can get. But who of us hasn’t experienced something equally as disgusting at some point in our lives? And in the end, we almost always look back on it and laugh. Because sometimes you just have to.
