"Things to Do: Threaten Bart, Do Laundry, Buy Corn Holders"

Doing laundry can be a harrowing experience with a toddler. While Abbie contentedly plays with her brothers’ stationary entertainers, I need to run downstairs and accomplish all of the standard laundry tasks, like sorting dirty clothes into piles of “light,” “dark,” “pretreat,” and “soak in straight bleach because that’s your only hope of ever getting that out.” Once the machine is spinning, I rush upstairs before Abbie finds a way to get into trouble, such as dismantling her brothers’ stationary entertainers. I now see the wisdom of homes that offer first floor laundry rooms, though I still question how useful they’d be when all the bedrooms are on the second floor.

Yesterday I was trying to run a couple loads of laundry. Abbie was out of clean shorts thanks to her habit of poking in her dirty diapers and smearing its contents on her pants, plus the boys needed bibs without food stains, or at least without fresh food stains. Those bright orange carrot stains are impossible to remove.

Suddenly the phone rang. If I’d been thinking ahead, I’d have brought the handset with to do laundry, but these days I reserve my thinking ahead efforts to moving dangerous and/or fragile objects out of reach before they wind up in little mouths. I rushed upstairs to the kitchen and answered the phone. My heart almost stopped when, right after saying “hello,” I noticed Abbie:


My first thought was “she’s got a dirty diaper and dear lord what is she putting in her mouth?” Then I remembered that I’d made peanut butter krispie treats right before starting laundry, and had sprinkled a few chocolate chips on top. As you can see in the top right of the picture, I left them to cool on the stove while the chocolate chips melted on top. Abbie can now apparently reach into a pan on top of the stove while standing on the floor. How do I know this?


She was snacking by sticking her fingers in the congealing chocolate. Being a toddler, she wasn’t having 100% accuracy in inserting her chocolately fingers into her mouth. Notice that the chocolate is only covering a small part of the treats. That’s because Ellie doesn’t care for chocolate. This may sound weird, but I’m used to it growing up with a friend who didn’t care for chocolate either. Of course he could use the “I’m deathly allergic to chocolate” excuse for not eating it.

I was literally speechless on the phone. I wanted to cry, but then I realized it wasn’t nearly as bad as my initial fear. Then I wanted to laugh. Fortunately Ellie was on the other end of the line, so I didn’t have to do much explaining about why I was unable to talk. I just had to take some pictures for later viewing.


Note that the dog knows who to hang around. After assuring Ellie that everything was okay, I hung up the phone and started work cleaning up. The mess was restricted to Abbie and her clothes, so at least I didn’t have to wash any walls. Or dog fur. I simply removed Abbie’s clothes and wiped the chocolate off her skin. Then I moved the krispie treats into the refrigerator, and ran back downstairs to throw her clothes into that “pretreat” pile I’d started.