The Boy got into the bleach
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I had The Boy to myself last night, as Mari was attending a year-end nomikai for some of the local mothers. Things did not go smoothly.
I guess we're into the "terrible twos" already. Terrible as in "hitting his parents", "willfully breaking things", "purposefully dumping his milk on the table and floor at every meal". And Two as in, why does anyone have a second child!
Mari left at around 15:30 and The Boy and I played for about half an hour. Then we went grocery shopping by bike, as I wanted to make chili con carne for dinner (for Mari and me). That trip went well enough and by 17:30 we were back (The Boy's hands were cold as ice because he refuses to wear mitts—on the hand he also refused to leave behind a toy car and I wound up doubling back to pick it up twice on the journey).
By 18:30 the chili was burbling away quietly. Time to bathe the child. Our normal routine includes me first cleaning the bathtub. I usually get The Boy's clothes off and have him standing about in the shower area while I do this, but with the weather now cold I need to fill the tub with hot water before I can get him into the unheated bathing room. So I left him in the outer bathroom where the sink and cabinets are.
When I heard a burbling sound behind me I whirled about to find that The Boy had found a bleach bottle tucked away in the back of one of the cabinets, and was now pouring it all over the floor.
Yelping, I snatched the thing away from him and after some fumbling set it down—why is it that bleach makes everything so slippery! Then I pushed his hands under the tap and made sure he didn't get any bleach in his eyes. Then it was his feet, because I could just see him tracking bleach through the house.
Stripping off his clothes, I tossed them in the sink and thought about what to do with the bleach that The Boy had spilled. To buy myself some time, I decided to sit The Boy on his potty. That done, I dumped the meager results into the toilet, and told The Boy to flush the toilet.
Then I dashed back to the cabinet where we've got some rags and grabbed a towel for the bleach. Soaking it, I began to mop up the stuff. When I'd cleaned up the immediate mess, I realized that I could hear a new splashing sound.
With a cry I went back to the separate little roomlet that has the toilet, and found that The Boy had been using the pan from the potty to scoop water from the toilet.
It was at this point that I began to curse long and loudly. Between breaths, I urged The Boy out of the toilet room and stared at the mess.
That's when he started to pee on the carpet. I'm actually a little surprised that The Boy's never tried to pronounce "fucking unbelievable". My mood was by then so bad that I couldn't even laugh when The Boy began to ape my actions, throwing his hands in the air and yelling unintelligably.
I decided that the mess in the toilet room could wait. But I didn't want the bleach-soaked towel in the mix where I'd be toweling The Boy off after his bath, so I took that towel from the sink room and tossed it on the floor of the toilet room where I hoped the bleach would do some good for the possibly piss-laden water on the floor there.
Then The Boy and I had our bath. When I'd finally calmed down a bit, I told The Boy, "Please don't pee on the carpet any more."
He told me, "OK".
An hour later, when Mari was home again (she'd eaten, as it turned out), The Boy repeatedly hit her in the face and wound up spending a fair bit of time in the hallway as punishment.
The kid's on a roll these days, to be sure.
In the end, I managed to get most of the piss out of the carpet and mopped up the mess in the toilet room. And happily, no one was blinded by bleach. In fact, there was only one small area of bleaching on The Boy's clothes or mine was on The Boy's collar. I've now put one of the rubber-lined rugs we bought for the patio on the stretch of hallway carpet where he's now peed about three or four times.