How to Bathe Your Child in a Joanns

Every once in a while a creativity bug snatches on to me and I feel the need to peruse a Joanns or Michaels store and spend some money on projects I will never finish.  I stick Evee in the front of the cart and Sarah in the basket, hand out some snacks and toys, and then stroll around for as long as their good behavior lasts.

During one of these outings I received a call from a family member and we got to talking… and talking.  You know how it goes.  To my delight, my children were absolute angels the entire time (and it was a long time).  Evee sat in the front chewing on her binky quite contentedly and looking around while Sarah played quietly with toys. 

After much longer than it should have taken me to realize, I began to get suspicious at how very quiet Sarah was.  I leaned forward so I could see exactly what was keeping her so attentive.

Any guesses?  With the whole inventory of a craft supply store at her sticky fingertips, what does she choose to make a mess with?  Paint.  The easiest thing in the world to clean up.

It was white paint which had apparently reminded her of lotion, so she treated it like lotion: shmeared from her ankles to her thighs and all up and down her arms.  She’d also taken to applying a fresh coat to the sides of the basket she was in, and when she’d tired of that she just dumped the rest in my favorite leather bag where it dripped all over and in to my favorite leather wallet and everything else.

I took a moment to remind myself that I was in a very public place and that my reaction could result in the calling of CPS if I wasn’t careful.

So I didn’t say a word.  But what do you do with a child covered in wet, and quickly drying, paint?  There was no way I was going to let that disaster anywhere near my car for the twenty minute drive home.

I took the only option I had available to me: I grimaced bravely and wheeled us all down to the bathroom in the back of the store.  Thankfully the room was big enough for me to push the whole cart into, so at least everyone was contained and within sight.  But now what to do with Evee?  She was too small at the time to leave in the cart untended while I dealt with Sarah’s mess.

Thankfully blessings in heaven came to me in the form of a complete stranger who took pity on me and my plight.  She held the cute fat baby and chatted with me about the joys of raising interesting children while I very carefully picked Sarah up out of the cart and placed her into the one sink.  She did not like this.  It could not have been very comfortable.  Unfortunately for her I was not in the mood to take pity, especially once I’d noticed that she’d managed to get paint on the new and very cute shirt I was wearing.

A couple hundred paper towels, a lot of scrubbing, and a few promises to Sarah of her being grounded from paint for forever and ever later, I’d finally managed to get all the paint off her skin and most of it off her clothes.  My bag and wallet were a lost cause, never to be the same again.  And the green plastic cart will forever be endowed with essence of Sarah’s creativity, as it was the last thing I cleaned and the paint had already dried.

We thanked the very nice stranger profusely (and I thanked my lucky stars she wasn’t some psycho and didn’t run off with Evee while I was up to my elbows in paint).  We went to the front of the store and paid for the ruined paint and a few other things I had thrown in the cart earlier that either had or had not been painted on as well.  It was about fifty-fifty.

But at least it was over. Until next time, at least.

The most interesting part of this whole story is that some months later I was telling it to my brother’s fiancé and she claimed to have already heard about it from a friend of hers who had passed through that Joanns bathroom while I was bathing the struggling toddler in the sink.  It made me all the happier that I had refrained from using expletives.  You never know who’s watching, right?