This morning I was working away in my office when I heard Adam’s voice. It sounded sort of small and distant, as though it were coming across a string and into a tin can held up to my ear.
Strange, since I didn’t have a tin can telephone on my ear. Even stranger, it sounded like he said there had been an explosion in the basement.
Lucy and Alice were in the midst of a giggle fest in their bedroom, so I had to holler at them to pipe down for a second.
Then came Adam’s voice again—through the laundry chute.
“I must have misheard you,” I called down. “It sounded like you said ‘explosion.’”
“Yep,” he said. “In the dryer. It’s really bad.”
I don’t know about you, but when I hear explosion, basement, dryer and really bad all together in one sentence, I have but one thought:
“Oh no. A rat crawled into our dryer and died and somehow through the process of decomposition accelerated by heat, its guts burst from its belly and are now sliding slowly, cruelly down the sides of the dryer, weaving awful new patterns into our clothing.”
But maybe that’s just me. In my own personal dictionary of life’s little traumas, “bad” by means rats, dead or alive, along with innards of any sort.
So it was good news, then, that the basement explosion involved neither rats nor their juicy bits.
It was a crayon, hot pink, that made it through the wash and into the dryer before it succumbed to the heat and exploded all over every single long-sleeved uniform shirt the kids own, as well as our bath mat and Adam’s pillowcase, which he tossed into the wash yesterday after it got covered in lavender bubble bath.
(This bubble bath business is a long story unto itself, as is the reason the bath mat was being washed in the first place. Let’s just say that the bubble bath meant Alice had to take a second bath right after the first, only this time without bubble bath because the last of the bottle was on Adam’s pillow. And I am pleased to report that it was chocolate on the bath mat, and not what I’d originally suspected.)
In any case, the good news is at least there were no rats involved, unless by “rat” you mean the kid who put the crayon in her shirt pocket. (And I know which kid it was. The shirt looks like her heart burst. It’s sort of gruesome.)
Oh, but I joke, I joke. Who hasn’t put a crayon through the wash? Any kid who hasn’t probably doesn’t color enough. Or that’s what I say to make myself feel better for not checking pockets thoroughly before I toss stuff down the laundry chute.
The hard part, though, is getting the crayon out of the clothes and off the drum of the dryer. But even that isn’t as hard as I’d feared.
A friend sent along a recipe for removing crayon wax from clothing. The list looked long at first. But then when I went down and compared it to the list of things I’ve accumulated as a parent—Shout, OxiClean and the leftover Borax from the slime we made at Lucy’s “gross and disgusting”-themed birthday party—I realized that I already have it all.
And that is true, in an even bigger way. Stuff goes wrong in life. But when you have the wisdom and support of friends, a well-stocked cleaning supplies cupboard, and acceptance of the fact that small calamities will happen even when we are busy with other things, you feel better, almost instantly.
But I’ve still made it good and clear to the kids that crayons don’t go in pockets. Judging from the looks on their faces when they saw their school shirts, this time they’re going to remember.