The Incident

I guess we’ve known it’s been coming for quite some time. Aside from the occasional tantrum, we like to assume that Zoë is our perfect little angel. And for the first time she sought to prove us wrong.

I like to refer to the incident as what will likely be one of Zoë’s earliest memories, and quite possibly be the reason for her laying on a couch explaining her miserable childhood twenty years from now.

So Saturday night. We’d finished dying Easter eggs. Jen took Zoë into bed and was reading her a book called “Daddy’s Scratchy Face”. Zoë requested my presence for a demonstration. I gladly obliged, then gave some loves and left the room.

I spotted something on the way out. Looking back, I could have prevented all of this.

On the way out of the room I noticed a bottle of baby powder next to her little shopping cart. Said bottle was open (the little holes up top at least, not full blown cap off). I thought this odd because we never use baby powder. Seriously. Never. But I figured Jen had just brought her in there and changed her, so maybe she was changing things up. So I said nothing.

Fool.

Twenty minutes or so later I’m sitting out on the porch having a cigarette and enjoying my favorite Mexican Narco Cartel blog when Jen pops her head in.

“I need you. We have a toddler issue and you’re not going to like it.”

The blood in my veins ran icy. All I could manage was “I think I know where this is going” as I walked back into the house.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of baby powder. Not substantial, but hanging in the air.

Then I saw the child on the naughty stool in nothing but a diaper, bawling her eyes out and white as a ghost. And I mean literally white.

I walked into her room and was greeted by a Michigan winter. Unfortunately, the very few pics I took were of awful quality. Partially because I was laughing so much and partly there was already a bit of a cloud in the room.

You really can’t tell from the photos, but she had sprinkled baby powder over EVERYTHING. It coated her bed, was all over the floor, on her toys, the walls, her furniture.

Of course, rather quickly things turned from jovial to more and more pissed as I started to clean the mess she’d made. Particularly because one thing became very evident while I cleaned. This was no accident. This wasn’t “I’m curious what will happen”.

No, her favorite blanket and doll were pushed over by the door so that she could intentionally NOT hit them. She wouldn’t want those ruined, now would she?

From what I’ve heard after the fact when Jen busted her there was a stare down between the two like an old Spaghetti Western. She knew she’d been caught red handed. I still wonder how she thought she’d get away with it.

Anyways, I set to cleaning her room, starting with a can of compressed air. At first I was joking that I felt like I was in an outtake from Scarface, but with each passing moment I began to realize the severity of what she had done.

Baby powder is incredibly fine and resistant to moisture, which means that it was kicking up massive amounts of dust. It quickly went from “Jeez, that’s some dust”, to me having to leave the room every 15 minutes or so to chug a half liter of water and hit Jen’s inhaler. My nostrils were solidly lined. I TASTED the powder. The cloud got so bad that it became difficult to see and I was hacking and wheezing trying to breathe the solid matter. By the time I was done I was white as a ghost. Zoë and I had taken a shower earlier that evening and we both once again found ourselves in there, washing a fine coating of dust off.

It took 2 hours to clean her room. Dusting, vacuuming, steam cleaning, setting up fans to blow dust out the window. The cloud infiltrated the living room. Jen has asthma and had to be told to stay far away from the room. Bobby wanted to help but I told him to stay away as well in case I needed a driver to get me to the ER. It was bad.

My lungs burned for two days afterwards. I’m still coughing up little bits of talcum.

As always, click the pics for a larger view.