This photo was taken on Easter Sunday. I love that dress that Goldie is wearing, and was so excited to have her look all adorable and Easter-y when we went out to dinner with my parents that night.
Do you know what happened to that dress before anyone other than myself and Kendrick were able to look at her in it and appreciate said adorableness?
You don’t want to know.
(Seriously you don’t. But if you’ve seen The Exorcist you have a pretty good idea.)
The craziest thing about this particular incident, though – which happened in a taxi on the way to the (really pretty fancy) restaurant where we were having Easter dinner – wasn’t the incident itself, but rather the aftermath. The thing is, when stuff like this happened with Indy (and oh it did), it was all emergencies and what-do-I-dos and oh-my-god-everyone’s-looking-at-us-and-thinking-we’re-terrible-parents.
And with Goldie I’m like…Well, that happened. I guess I’m going to have to deal with it now.
So after the incident occurred, what Kendrick and I did was mutter “Oh, shit” under our breaths (because for real, guys, it was bad). And then we very calmly strollered our daughter through the restaurant, hoping nobody was looking at us too closely, and deposited her on a little fold-up mat on the floor outside this very fancy restaurant’s bathroom (because there was no room in the bathrooms themselves and it was very much a two-person job). And then we set to work cleaning her up. And through the whole thing, we were’t yelling at each other to hurry up or worrying about the fact that people passing by on the way to the restrooms were glaring at us (and trust me, they were) or getting upset that we didn’t have enough wipes or diapers or appropriately sized extra clothing (ooops; p.s. always have extra clothing); we were laughing. Like, hysterically.
And that night didn’t go down in my memory as the night we had that terrible Easter dinner; it went down in my memory as one of the funnier parenting experiences I’ve ever had.
Because what we know now, and didn’t know yet with Indy, was that all we can do as parents is the best we can. It’s like getting on an airplane with your child: you do everything in your power to make the experience as pleasant and non-intrusive for others as possible, but sometimes you do everything you can, and things happen anyway. And getting all freaked out about it does absolutely no one any good – least of all your kid.
I remember that panic. I sympathize with that panic.
But you know what I learned with child number one that has helped out really quite a lot with the chilling-out factor when it comes to child number two?
Children lick floors.
They lick. Floors.
Frequently.
And that’s not all. Yesterday my daughter spent a good half an hour sitting in the park and trying to eat dirt, and I’m fairly certain that she succeeded. The other day she ingested enough Play-Doh to turn the lower half of her face blue before I realized what was going on. A couple of weeks ago Kendrick gave her a strawberry by accident (you’re supposed to wait until babies are one before they eat strawberries). And right now she’s sitting next to me all happy and babbly and doing just fine, thanks.
What I’m trying to say here: Kids are ferociously resilient little creatures, and that’s a good thing because they’re also ferociously determined to get themselves into as many potentially disastrous situations as humanly possible. But they get through them.
And so do we.
