Every parent will tell you, that generally, the hour before bedtime is known as
happy hour.
This is the mental time, usually in our house it’s between six and seven that:
– dinner gets served, eaten and scraped off the wall;
– dessert gets eaten before dinner, and cleaned up off the couch;
– dishes get washed;
– pyjamas get found;
– baths get run and;
– Cameron’s mind plays.
What does that last one mean? It means this, simply. It’s the time where she’s come home, chilled out and now plays. This means, in our world…
do random shit.
Random shit includes:
– emptying the contents of the playroom onto the lounge floor.
– sometimes this entails taking the laundry with her.
– feeding the fish. and i don’t mean fish food. just this week I found a chocolate-covered barbie doll in there.
– prancing around in a fairy-princess-dress and singing ‘MAMMA MIA HERE I GO AGAIN’ on loud, on a loop.
– asking a million questions at forty-miles an hour and,
– exploring.
“Exploring?”, you ask. Well, let’s just think about that.
We all know about her current addiction to “flushing things down the toilet that don’t belong in the toilet” (current rescue tally includes no less than 14 items and something I’m still not sure I can identify but it definitely is not something that belongs in a toilet. it may or may not be a scarf. which is interesting. because it clearly does not belong to me). I am now adept at fixing blocked toilets. One step closer to my dream career of plumber
So, let me tell you, instead, about her other favourite thing… what I call, the bags and bags and random shit swaparound.
Cam loves to “pack” handbags with random things, and then carry them around as a handbag, pretending she is going shopping. And when I say random, I mean, RANDOM. They could be anything. From a can-opener, to a collection of toys, to shoes, to the bubble bath, to towels, to anything inbetween. The full spectrum. The whisk is also a firm favourite.
This habit’s been around forever. It’s genetic. She gets it from my mother. I know this because, whenever my Dad would look for something in our house, he’d always blame my mother and say, in his empathic way “Eve, you moooved it” or “IT has been mooooved”.
She’s been doing it since she was a toddler. The first sign I ever had of it was the loss of our doorstop in the bedroom. Yes, a doorstop. She was eleven months old at the time. I still haven’t found it. Either she ate it or she stuck it in the bin.
The second sign I had of it was when other people’s cellphones would go missing when they came to visit. We’d ring them, trying to find them, searching under the couch and turning the house upside down. Somewhere, we’d always hear a faint ring but could never pinpoint it.
Until, one day, I found cellphone that had gone missing. In the freezer.
Yep. The Freezer.
Who knows why?
People don’t believe me when I say “don’t let her play with your phone”.
Current Cellphone fatality rate: 5.
(none of them mine, one of them deserved it and the other four, thankfully, survived)
So, it was no surprise that during happy hour last night, Cam came to me, whilst wearing the colander on her head and a pair of mismatched gloves, and said
“Mom. I’ve made a discovery”.
I won’t lie. I trembled a bit.
Thinking “awesome. the two remaining fish are bound to be a-goner now”.
I was wrong.
She quietly took my hand and led me into the bathroom.
And there, in the bathroom, I found..
That if you look very carefully under our bath, there is a little hole where a pipe goes in.
And in there, in there, she had stuffed..
a small collection of shiny things. hairclips, beads, hairbands, jewellery and a kung fu panda watch.
She said:
“MOM! it’s my treasure collection!”
I said:
“Absolutely! how wonderful.. now, how do we get it out?”
She said:
“That’s why I fetched you. What time is it on my watch?”
🙂