Unsupervised children

On Thursday we had some friends over to play and eat dinner because both of our husbands were gone for the evening.  The kids were playing in the basement while we were getting dinner ready.  I remember specifically asking my friend if I was a bad mom for letting my kids play downstairs unsupervised at this age while I did things like prepare dinner, empty the dishwasher and set the table.  We decided it was a good way to encourage independent play.  However, there are sometimes consequences.  When the kids came up for supper Lincoln had rice all over in his hair.  A quick peek downstairs revealed that half of the rice from the rice table was in a pile on the floor next to the rice table.  I didn't think much more about it until bathtime two hours later.  While undressing Lincoln I discovered rice all along the top of his diaper.  Then I discovered a bunch of rice in his diaper.  His very wet diaper.  We'll just stop with the word picture there.

After we released the kids from the dinner table they went upstairs to Emily's room while my friend & I finished eating and cleaning up.  I consider it partially my fault because I distinctly heard the squeak of the medicine cabinet door in the upstairs bathroom on two occasions and did not go up to investigate.  When it was time to start packing up, my friend & I discovered that the kids had decided to "decorate" Emily's room using stuff from the bath caddy in the bathroom.  There was strawberry body wash covering Emily's money bank inside and out, dripped along the bookshelf, all along the roof of her princess tent and filling the potted plant.  There was also fruity-flavored toothpaste on a rug and diaper ointment smeared in various places--including Emily's hair.  You just had to laugh out loud.  Luckily, the body wash was easy to wipe off of everything, although it will be interesting to see how the plant fares.  The toothpaste was clear, and the rug is washable.  I did contemplate whether or not to add detergent to the load of towels we used to clean everything up.  I ended up running it through the quick wash cycle once without detergent and then once with.

Dealing with Emily's hair has been a bit trickier.  We shampooed it three times that night with little impact.  I put Lincoln to bed and googled "diaper cream in hair."  I had 1,880,000 results in .21 seconds.  After skimming the first few, the general consensus seemed to be Dawn dish soap.  We happen to only have Joy right now, but I sent Emily back into the bathtub for two rounds of washing with dish soap.  I couldn't tell much of a difference, so I decided just to put her to bed.  She woke up with a crazy, greasy hairdo that was surprisingly still very staticky (which is a word I just made up).  Other suggestions online were concoctions of baking soda, vinegar and lemon juice.  One lady said she tried everything and found that GoJo was the only thing that worked on her two-year-old.  I'm not quite ready to go that far yet.  We'll probably just try some more dish soap tonight and the night after that.  Thankfully, the hand-held showerhead works great and Emily has been relatively cooperative throughout the whole ordeal.  Worst-case scenario is that she just has greasy hair for awhile.  I'm betting Emily's preschool teachers have seen worse. ;o)

P.S. To my dear friend--please know that you are welcome back to my house any time.  We'll just clean up the messes together. :o)