Messy Moment: "I'm Shopping For A New Bedroom Rug Online These Days"

My husband and I have two sons: a thirteen-year-old and a one-and-a-half-year-old. This means that we get the joys of parenting a fresh teenager and a toddler, at the exact same time.

We buy our bottles of Excedrin at Costco.

Our older son, Nolan, has developed a passion for writing with a quill, exactly like Benjamin Franklin used to do. Never mind the luxury that is a good gel pen; those are entirely too new-age for our boy, regardless of the nerdy joy they bring to his mama. As far as heʼs concerned, America started to decline when the fountain pen and whittled turkey feather became old fashioned. Nolan has begun to collect old pens. He can talk about a fountain pen collection exactly like an old man, wearing a cardigan sweater that smells of mothballs. And still, we are head over our heels in love with that boy.

As every Gatherer Of Ye Olde Pens knows, if youʼre going to put your collection to good use, you need pots of ink. Black ink... red ink... or dark berries that have been run through the electric, Ninja mixer, exactly as Lewis and Clark used to do before writing in their journals... it doesnʼt matter. You just canʼt fancy-up your scrollwork without a pot of ink to accompany your quill.

The most commonly-spoken phrase at our house, other than, “Whatʼs for dinner?” is, “Did you put the lid on your ink?” Because a bottle of India ink WITHOUT the lid is more dangerous in a household with boys than a flamethrower.

Two weeks ago, I forgot to ask this question.

It was a Thursday morning. I was in the shower, because Iʼd already determined that I had errands to run that day that would require something a little fancier than the standard mom outfit of black yoga pants and unwashed hair. When you have a toddler who climbs more things than Spider-Man does, you come to cherish your alone time in the hot shower.

I may have taken longer to shave that Thursday. I probably stood in the shower with my eyes closed and my forehead resting on the fiberglass wall while the hot water just ran down. I may even have considered finally following the instructions on the bottle of shampoo: Wash, rinse, repeat. Because the repeating? Well, it allows for extra alone time, before you have to get out, dry off, and pull Spider-Man off of the kitchen counters and feed him a breakfast of steel-cut oats and homemade yogurt.

Or SʼMores flavored Pop Tarts. Whichever.

When I finally DID get out of the shower that morning, I suddenly realized that there was some busyness and noise going on in our house that would have put the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange to shame.

I pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt (which is ever-so-very-much more fancy than the aforementioned black yoga pants and T-shirt), wrapped a towel around my hair, and opened the bathroom door to complete pandemonium.

Do you know what a mother enjoys hearing on a Thursday morning, just thirty minutes before she has to get the 7th grader to school?

“The baby grabbed an open bottle of India ink off Nolanʼs desk; we have ink EVERYWHERE!”

It was true.

A small bottle of India ink can hold about an ounce. When you turn it upside down onto a bedroom floor, itʼs exactly like a tiny, import car full of clowns at the circus: About thirty-four gallons of ink will spill out.

Our toddler looked like the tar baby from Brer Rabbit. My husband, who had decided to grab that tar baby from the middle of the catastrophe, to prevent further explosions, was stained with the result of his courage. Nolan was scrambling for TOWELS! TOWELS! WE NEED WET TOWELS! And there I stood, taking it all in.

Nash, age one, was covered in ink. His LOANED-TO-US-AS-HAND-ME-DOWNS-

THAT-NEED-TO-BE-RETURNED-BECAUSE-THEYʼRE-HAVING-MORE-BABIES-AT-

THEIR-HOUSE footed pajamas were black. The dinosaurs on those jammies were no longer recognizable. My husband, Jim, was standing at the bathroom sink, furiously trying to scrub ink off of his own face. The area rug in Nolanʼs bedroom looked like a crime scene; it only lacked the yellow tape wrapped around the door and a detective standing nearby with a donut in one hand, as he nodded and said, “It looks like the perpetrator carried the ink from the desk to HERE... and then... just turned it upside down.” Nolan was on his hands and knees, scrubbing OUR BELOVED HARDWOOD FLOORS with a wet bath towel.

Of course, it was one of our better bath towels, because at this house, we have better bath towels, not-so-good-any-more bath towels, and the bath towels that are frayed enough to be relegated to YOU CAN TAKE THIS ONE TO THE LAKE AND WRAP UP ALL THE FROGS YOU CATCH WITH IT. This isnʼt the Ritz-Carlton around here, with all of their Egyptian cotton towels that fluff up to be the size of a Volkswagen bus.

Someone might just have well announced, “Your house is on fire!” that Thursday morning; it would have created the same level of adrenaline explosion inside of me, all before Iʼd had my cup of coffee.

Jim came back from our master bathroom, and his face was relatively clean. I was happy for that, because itʼs kind of hard to explain stuff like that at the office. Of course, he was missing his top layer of epidermis, but he was stain-free.

We all burst into action that morning, which is so much fun, when youʼre driven by the ticking of the clock and the threat of a pink tardy slip for your 7th grader. We scrubbed exactly like Cinderella hopped up on a decent cold medication, while we listened to Nolan chant, “Iʼm so sorry! Iʼm so sorry! I forgot to put the lid on my ink!”

Nash was left to stand there, as black as the sin of dumping out India ink indoors, while we fought to save the floors. The salvation of my hardwoods ranked a bit higher than cleaning up the baby that morning.

Donʼt judge.

Iʼm happy to announce that the local company who installed our floors and chose a nice polyurethane for us knew what they were doing. Apparently, they anticipate a life of REAL LIVING on the floors they lay. The India ink came OFF the floors.

And the angels sang HALLELUJAH.

The ink did not, however, come off of the area rug or the dinosaur-covered, footed pajamas that we were planning to give back to the original owner, once we outgrew them. Both of these, along with two of our better bath towels, went to be with Jesus. Theyʼre resting comfortably in the landfill.

The moral of this story is that real life happens. No matter how many photos we pin on Pinterest of pristine and clean houses and educational activities for toddlers, things are going to explode around us. No one ever pins those kinds of moments, because we like to create an illusion that we have it all together on Thursday mornings before school. Itʼs pretty much exactly what Jesus does for us. He takes the black-as-the-India-ink sin that weʼve spilled all over ourselves, and He cleans it up. (He probably uses the luxury bath towels, with His monogram on them, too.) He wipes our sins clean, and then He tells us, “But this part? Well, it has to go to the landfill, if you want to continue following Me. We have to get rid of this part completely and forever. But the stuff thatʼs left, I can clean up quite nicely.”

Iʼm thankful for that. Iʼm thankful that Jesus can clean me up, and shows me what needs to go. And Iʼm thankful that He entrusted these two precious boys to me and Jim.

I can say that, because my hardwood floors are still unblemished. Had they not come clean, the boys might have found themselves on eBay.

- Tammy Billings, MOPS Mom

Tammy is a wife and mother of 2 children, ages 13 and 1 1/2. She has recently joined MOPS in support of entering the baby and toddler years once again, blessedly, but somewhat unexpectedly. Her presence at our MOPS meetings is a comfort, her love for Jesus a special and hefty gift, and her sense of humor a brilliant light. She keeps us all laughing at the beauty and difficulty of motherhood through her personal blog Jedi Mama: Life at a Jedi House. We are hoping to hear from her often here on the Morning MOPS Blog!