Why five year-olds (and their mothers) still need
nightlights
I’ll admit it. I am a bad mother, and sadly a victim of our
”
everything-must-be-perfect-and-fragrant,
”
Home and Garden Magazine mentality. I forewent practicality, and
well, let’s face it
– good mothering skills – for the sake of a bathroom that smells
like flowers. Overpowering, mutant, chemically enhanced
flowers.
Why five year-olds (and their mothers) still need nightlights
I’ll admit it. I am a bad mother, and sadly a victim of our “everything-must-be-perfect-and-fragrant,” Home and Garden Magazine mentality. I forewent practicality, and well, let’s face it – good mothering skills – for the sake of a bathroom that smells like flowers. Overpowering, mutant, chemically enhanced flowers.
I did have a nightlight in the bathroom, but opted to put in one of those little plug-in air freshener things instead. Yes, I know that it’s not remotely believable that any bathroom, let alone a Sinon bathroom (you will just have to trust me on this) would ever smell like flowers, but Johnson Wax makes a fortune on people like me, happy to live the illusion.
That came back to bite me when I began straightening up the then 5-year old Boy’s bedroom. He had spent an evening “reading” his picture books and manufacturing guns out of his sister’s old Barbies.
I was putting away the larger books on his shelf when my acute sense of smell, almost worthy of “Spidey sense” I must admit, told me that something wasn’t up to snuff.
I snorted and snuffled, but couldn’t figure out what that strange smell was. It vaguely reminded me of the cat box in one of my high school friend’s rooms. That always grossed me out. I couldn’t figure out why they had this huge house, yet put the cat box where people slept. But that’s another story.
I shrugged my shoulders, and noted that I guess all boys are in fact a little disgusting, as The Boy’s big sister had so often pointed out; all except for Ben Affleck, also according to The Girl.
While piling all of the scattered toys and books, back into their home in the bookcase, I had dropped a book on the floor in front of it. When I bent with a middle-aged grunt to pick it up, I saw that inside one of The Boy’s most cherished toys, his “Digger Dan,” that there was a book inside the little scoop.
I picked up the book, and thought, “Hmmm….this book is wet. Darn that kid. I have told him a million times to quit playing in the water in the bathroom.”
I’d spent the latter part of the summer chasing him out of there after hearing a lot of running water, splashing around and giggling. Then, suddenly, it hit me.
The book had not been merely set into the scoop of the “Digger Dan”… it had been floating there. Floating on something that dare not speak its yellow name. Inside the yellow “Digger Dan,” no less.
The Boy, with the absence of the nightlight, had discovered that necessity is the mother of invention and used his beloved “Digger Dan” as a urinal.
I was fearful of what else I might find in other parts of his room. I’d read somewhere that younger kids like to collect things. And with that find, there might be some other very scary things. I made a mental note to have The Husband “go play” with The Boy in his room one night that week. The “disgusting boys” could stick together and anything The Husband found wouldn’t gross him out nearly as much as it would me.
“Digger Dan” and the floating book found a new home in the trash in the garbage cans in the garage.
I think it’s true that we learn how to parent as we go along, since kids don’t come equipped with instruction manuals. We learn at the hands of our kids. Thanks to The Boy and his teaching methods, now, in the bathroom, brightly shines the nightlight.
Unscented.
