Monday, March 22, 2010

How to clean your child

Before I tell you the meaning of the title, let me first explain what happened before hand.
I have some friends who like to stay at my house pretty regularly. There are five kids and a mom. The kids are all around our ages; the oldest is close to my age, the second oldest is close to my younger sister's age, and the two youngest are around my brother's ages. We'd been enjoying the nice weather we'd been having lately and were letting the young kids play outside. This left us free to do pretty much whatever we wanted. So we enjoyed our free time...We should have known better. I remember coming down the stairs and hearing the moms giggling. I could also hear water running from the hose faucet on the side of our house...that was our first bad sign.

The moms mentioned that they told the kids to stop playing with the water and yelled it out into my yard again. I was puzzled at first at why the kids would be wanting water...that is, until I saw them. I was so shocked at the little people's appearance that I went outside onto our deck to get a better look. But my eyes hadn't deceived me. All of the kids (I'm not exaggerating) were covered from head to toe in mud. They had it in their hair, on their clothes, and caked on their hands and feet.

I asked the kids what they were doing. My little brother's answer didn't comfort me. "We can't use the water so we're melting snow to make more water. " They needed the water to make either a little waterfall in the backyard or to make the biggest mud hole I'd ever seen in my yard. (I can't remember which).

Then the moms had to go run out and do something out of the house for a really long time, leaving us older people with the kids...great.

This brings me to the title. Needless to say, we put off cleaning the kids for as long as we could. We fed them outside, watched them outside, and we even...let them use the bathroom in our yard...

Assuming
the kids started their playing early in the morning they played for almost the whole day. But then the time came when the kids got tired of being outside.
Instantly, the wheels began turning in my mind. I'd worked or been in enough VBS's and co-ops that I knew a lot about stations and how to work a lot of people with less workers. Considering there were three of us "workers" and four little kids who were covered with mud from head to toe (but considering how dirty they were, I'll ad about a million children to the four) I thought I would need to call on that knowledge.

I announced that we would need three stations. One person would strip the kids at the door and carry them upstairs.

Another would stuff them in the shower and wash them up.

And the last person's job was to dry and clean the kids. (they also have to calm the sometimes screaming children by telling them that the shower's like a water park.)

When our parents got home, the kids were playing safely on the deck and we were all drying off in and outside the house. We behaved like champions as we told the moms what we had accomplished. The looked more confused than impressed.

So if you ever have a bunch of mud-children when your parents are gone (or maybe you are the parents and your older children have run away screaming)...ummm...well that works...but you probably wont need that information anytime soon...

Oh well. It may be useless knowledge but it was still a funny story-right?

2 comments:

Echoes in Ink said...

Useless?! By no means!

Susy

Unknown said...

You forgot the best part....

And the moms spent the day happily ever after....

:D