Image courtesy Pixabay
by Kelli Bowen
Newton’s third law says for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In my life it’s called balance. For every good day, there will be an equal and opposite not good day.
Take this past weekend: we hosted an event. We invited friends, some we haven’t seen in years, most haven’t been to our new house, and it was wonderful (hot as Hades but still good)!
Kids were slipping and sliding in the water, we had yard games set up, there was tons of food, and drinks and fireworks…just all around, fantastic afternoon and evening.
The next day we took the girls and Denali to our friends’ house for swimming and a doggie play date and again, great food and friends and fellowship. We watched fireworks on the way home. Everyone was drained from the sun, and ready for bed, including the dog.
Seriously: best times ever. I mean, it wasn’t all roses and rainbows, there was mom-yelling, threatening, kids acting up, firework anxiety, and ‘where did I set my ___?’ But still all of the in between times were fantastic and overshadowed the negatives, which were pretty minimal.
Miss A had a birthday a few days ago and hasn’t gotten to really get into her gifts as she’s been in a whirlwind of Independence Day magic, so this morning she woke up with a mission: do the things.
We first went out to use “Chalk in a can” which is some kind of demon foam/spray paint for children. Miss A ended up with it on her clothes, I ended up getting dusted with the Kids-First-Tagging kit, but it avoided my nice new white tank top, so that was the silver lining.
So we come in and she wants to do nail polish. I do not understand the giving of any kind of paint to little kids, other than maybe my friends secretly hate me and it’s passively represented with paint. Maybe they just want Miss A to express her creativity. Whatever. Let’s paint some nails.
I paint Miss A’s fingernails and she wants to paint my nails too. Okay. I go remove my toenail polish so she can paint my nails, and go back into the kitchen.
I make the super-amateur move of grabbing the nail polish by the cap and as I pick it up, the 95% loosened cap comes off, the bottle goes into a death spiral and now there’s purple finger nail polish on me, the carpet, the linoleum, the barstool, basically everywhere but inside the bottle. son of a —-
After several minutes of Hubby and me playing beat-the-clock trying to clean up quickly hardening nail polish on various surfaces, we found nail polish takes off the finish on our stool, nail polish remover takes off the finish on our linoleum, purple nail polish stains our carpet, and my new white tank top is now a paint shirt.
Maybe I’ll go online and see if I can find Kids-First-Flamethrower kits, I know a couple of Miss A’s friends with birthdays coming up…I’m going to go pour myself a drink first. I haven’t drank before noon for a long time, and as I said, life is all about balance.
Kelli makes her home in Cass County with her husband, two daughters (8 and 5) and two dogs. She works for a regional seed company by day and tries to be an alright mom, wife, friend and writer by night.
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