Pigs in Mud

A couple of mornings ago, I came downstairs from quickly blow drying my hair to find Madeline and Charlie rolling in two pounds of shredded cheddar. In the living room. Visualize this for a second: Charlie is shirtless on his back, rolling from side to side, grinding the cheese into the carpet with his 32 pound body. Madeline is on her elbows and knees, stuffing fistfuls into her mouth like we've never fed her. And Maple thinks she's died and gone to heaven. The cheese is showered everywhere; the empty zip top bag that I just bought the day before is littered on the floor, next to a couple of mutilated string cheeses.

My first instinct was to laugh and take pictures, but then I realized I'd come downstairs to food explosions every day (I took the pictures secretly). So I made my face look serious and said, "Oh, this is so sad." I softly asked Madeline if cheese belongs on the floor. Then I asked her how we could clean it up. Fast forward five minutes, and Madeline's wiry little body was pushing the vacuum cleaner around the carpet with all her might. It would only move a few inches at a time. "Mommy, it's so loud!" she would cry over the deafening force of our new HEPA-approved vacuum. "I know," I told her sadly, then pointed out some more cheese under the ottoman. The weight of the machine rolled the cheese like a thin pancake onto its wheels -- it would have been so much easier to clean the mess up myself. But Rob and I had just gone to our weekly parenting class the night before and I was determined.

All this before 8am. I guess I should grateful that it was cheese and not peanut butter, or something much much worse. And that the rug is dark. But I have to say, I can certainly appreciate how rolling around half naked in cheese and eating it with reckless abandon would be absolutely fabulous if you're a kid. Or maybe even 32?