Some of my greatest parenting fails

People see that I have two children who made it to double digits and assume that at some point I must have known what I was doing.

I did not. I still mostly feel like the nearest available adult in a long series of parenting disasters. Not the life-or-death kind. Just the kind that are gross, mildly alarming, or so ridiculous they end in an ER co-pay.

If you parent long enough, you collect these stories whether you want to or not. Each of my kids came with their own brand of chaos. Rae’s was reckless and discerning at the same time. Channing’s was mechanical and sneaky. Royce has pure dragon energy.

When Rae was 4, she discovered a dead mouse in her backpack at preschool and decided to keep that information to herself.

The landlord had put poison in the crawl space, and a mouse had crawled into her bag to die among the crayons and school papers. She found it at school when she got her homework out. She did not scream. She did not tell the teacher. She did not tell another child. She zipped the backpack back up with the dead mouse still inside, hung it in her cubby like normal, carried that secret all day, and came home with it still in there.

Then after school she whispered, “Mommy, there is a dead mouse in my backpack.”

Just me and her in the room, and she still whispered it.

When she was 2, she got herself accidentally drunk on rotten orange juice.

My mom had suggested packing away half her toys for a while and rotating them back later so they would feel new again. Somewhere in that process, Rae tucked a sippy cup full of orange juice into the bottom of a toy box. It sat there for at least a month, maybe longer, quietly fermenting while I went on with my life completely unaware of the tiny bootleg operation in my house.

When I brought the toy box back out, I let her play while I cooked dinner. First she got sleepy. Then clumsy. Then she started throwing up. I started checking cups and found the hidden one.

So I did what any mother hopes she never has to do. I grabbed the cup and took my toddler and her homemade hooch to the ER.

The doctors explained that between the sugar, the backwash, and the cracker crumbs little kids always add to their cups, she had basically made prison wine in a sippy cup.

She was fine. Sick to her stomach, sleepy, and kept overnight for observation.

Another time, I caught 3-year-old Rae playing beer pong with her tea set.

I was doing homework in the living room while she played in her room. When I went in to check on her, I found her little tea cups and play dishes arranged in a triangle, each one partially filled with water. Dolls and stuffed animals were lined up as an audience. She was tossing a ping pong ball she had found under the couch into the cups.

Later I learned that while I was at school one evening, her Uncle Sam had been watching her, and the two of them had spent their time “practicing” for the weekend.

Channing’s chaos was mechanical, sneaky, and usually left evidence behind. A terrible combination in a toddler.

When he was 2, Thy and I woke from a nap and realized he was no longer in the bed with us. A blue spot on the comforter led to fingerprints on the couch, smeared across the doorway, and tracked down the hall.

A trail.

I followed it to the pantry and immediately knew what had happened. The blue acrylic paint that had been on the very top shelf was now spilled across the pantry counter. The other colors were still sitting up there like witnesses.

Then we found Channing, also blue, hiding behind the pantry door.

Few parenting moments are more humbling than following a trail of blue fingerprints through your house before you have even fully opened your eyes and finding a blue toddler at the end of it.

For his third birthday, his Uncle Colin got him a little Radio Flyer scooter. It was an immediate hit. We were sure it was about to become his favorite toy.

Forty-eight hours later, we walked into his room and found it stripped for parts.

For something with two wheels and a handlebar, that scooter fought reassembly like it had principles. We tried. We failed. We looked for missing pieces. It stayed dead. At first Channing was thrilled with himself for getting it all apart. Later, he wanted us to fix it. We could not.

The scooter stayed in pieces. He did not get another one until we were reasonably sure he had stopped treating his toys like engineering puzzles.

Now he is 12 and rides a Frankensteined pro scooter made of random upgraded parts.

He never stopped taking things apart. He just got better at putting them back together.

Now if I could only get him to put the tools back when he is done.

Royce’s chaos is primarily stash-based. He has the energy of a tiny dragon with no assets except half-eaten food and random household objects he believes are treasures.

A few weeks ago, his speech therapist commented on how nice the living room looked after we rearranged things and got rid of some furniture. I was feeling pretty good about that, honestly.

About three minutes later, Royce started climbing up on the couch, peering behind it, and signing help.

Miss Lauren leaned over and said, trying not to laugh, “Um, I think he’s been keeping a stash back here. You might want to take a look.”

Behind the couch was an entire collection. Pieces of his brother’s skateboard, a random bolt, a few small toys, a dog collar he likes to wear as a belt, an orange, and several partially eaten sandwiches.

Several.

Which meant that while I had been enjoying my clean living room, my toddler had apparently been building a hidden sandwich lair behind the couch.

People can keep their parenting experts. I have the dead mouse, the prison wine, the tea-set beer pong, the blue fingerprints, the scooter autopsy, and the sandwich stash.

Somehow that has been enough to get two kids into double digits and one into a respectable early career in dragon hoarding.