Today afternoon, the husband came up at me furious. Nisarga’s face is smeared with snot. What kind of a mother are you? Can’t you even clean his face? He wiped Nisarga’s face clean.
I was puzzled. Nisarga didn’t have a cold. I hadn’t noticed him cough or sneezze or anything, and he’d given me a drooly kiss minutes before heading off to the outside room and encountering my husband who got immediately furious. He was drooly, but I most certainly didn’t notice any mess on his face. Strange.
I shrugged it off. Kids. Who knows?
The maid had just started to sweep the room, when she asked me what it was in the upturned stool. Puzzled, I went over. It is a short plastic stool that Nisarga had turned upside down and was banging for fun. the inside of it had a white mess. Thinking Nisarga had probably puked, I told her to put it in the bathroom, and I’d wash it. I looked around. There was no visible explanation for what else it could be.
This was most puzzling. The stool was behind me, as I sit working on the laptop, but it was a mere two feet away. I may miss a running nose, but no way is the mother gene in me not going to notice if the child vomits in such a quantity a mere two feet from me. It was strange. I realized that it probably was vomit that my husband noticed on my son’s face.
But there was something odd about the “vomit”. The inside of the stool is reinforced with ridges for strength, and they form a grid, so that there are raised squares. The “vomit” was in three of the squares, but they were not adjacent squares. Also the height of the stool being such, and the gap between the legs being too little, it didn’t seem physically easy for Nisarga to stick his head there to vomit like that.
Still, the mess had to be washed. Gingerely I ran water over the stool and the stuff started foaming! I touched it. It didn’t feel bad and smelled fantastic. Like my moisturizer, in fact 😀
In the meanwhile, the maid had independently reached the same conclusion when she found the empty moisturizer bottle pushed deep under the cupboard – with its cap off. I give him the bottle to play with because he likes it better than his toys. The cap is always screwed on well. No one is in the habit of half closed bottles here.
We have deduced that the kid has learned to screw the cap off the bottle and figured out how to pour stuff, smear it on his face, and then generally pour it around into suitable containers, which the hollows between the ridges on the inside of the stool turned out to be. And he seems to have enjoyed it thoroughly, because on seeing the bottle again, he immediately tapped it on his hand over and over till the remaining few drops of moisturizer were on his hands too. Then he rubbed his hands together and wiped his face and inhaled deeply. Cute.
All in all, I lost a bottle full of moisturizer I liked very much but never used. I learned that the kid now must be given empty bottles or stuff that is safe for him and we don’t mind losing. The husband not being able to smell hadn’t realized when he wiped his face that whatever it was, it was something perfumed.
Best of all, I am quite thrilled that he has figured out how to open bottles. Unscrewing a cap is not an easy trick for him.
I gave him bottles to play with again and again for hours after that, but he didn’t open another.