The Harrowing/Heartwarming Parent Moment of the Week

I had a difficult choice to make. Stay to hear the announcement of cabin points and see if Sweet Boy#1’s cabin won, or run off and figure out where in the world Sweet Boy#2, Sweet Boy#3, and their friend ran off to. I chose to stay and listen to cabin announcements and it’s a good thing because Sweet Boy#1’s cabin was the winner of the entire cabin  competition! But after all of our cheering, I ran off to find the other boys and that is a bad thing. Because I do find them and they have been engaged in a super soaker war…with real barricades made out of tents and tubs of paintball equipment…inside the house. Yep, there they were, hunkered down behind a makeshift bunker squirting each other with happy abandon…upon my arrival much parenting ensued! Ah well, guess that’s my job.

Sweet Boy#2 and Sweet Boy#3–Are playing happily outside on the porch until Sweet Boy#3 comes inside all disgruntled. “I can’t get this stuff off me,” he informs me. And no wonder, “this stuff” is homemade paint shellac that The Hunky Hubby used on all of the camp picnic tables and warned the boys never to touch…because you can’t get it off. We tried soap and water…no luck. We tried olive oil…made an even bigger mess of their hands by turning the sticky goo to an impossible white film. Finally we told them to hold their breath while we used mineral spirits. It worked! But then we had to use mineral spirits on everything that they had touched. The water pump handle, the doorknob, the bathroom doorknob, their feet, the bathroom faucet, the bathroom sink handles, and almost every square inch of our bathroom toilet. It took a long long time, but finally our home and children were shellac free. Although The Hunky Hubby was perhaps just a wee bit twitchy and an ounce less sane then he had been an hour before.