Don't sweat the small stuff

When Her Bad Mother asked me to blog-sit last week while she took off in a giant RV for some good ol’ close-knit family fun I jumped at the chance, because I’ve never been asked to blog-sit before and because, hello! It’s Her Bad Mother doing the asking! I made a personal vow to do her and her kickass blog justice by writing an amazing, inspiring and totally hilarious post. I carried my laptop down to the basement, the only place that’s truly quiet in this house, set myself up with a bottle of water and some reheated pizza, opened up a fresh new Word document…

…and drew a huge blank.

I couldn’t come up with anything so instead I focused on a figurine of an old man with John Lennon glasses, crouched down reading a book. I got familiar with it, studying the look on the old man’s face, noting his strong, capable hands and the way his robe looked a lot like acid wash. Upstairs in the den Dave was hanging out with a friend and I listened to them for a while, keenly, to their laughter and their rising and falling tones. I checked my email and for new friend requests on Facebook. I checked for updated celebrity gossip and scandal and when there was none, I watched the cursor blink on the blank page. Closely.

I sat back in my chair, relaxed and opened my mind, waiting to get struck by a fabulous post idea. All I got struck with was the urge to pee.

Dave saw the frustration on my face when I appeared upstairs. “You can make fun of me if you want,” he said, a hint of sympathy in his voice. “I don’t mind.”

His friend chuckled. “The possibilities are endless,” he said, spreading his arms widely, and we all started cracking up, because it’s so true. I often write about him on my blog because he’s great fodder.

I started thinking about things I could write about: his desire to paint this really creepy looking knockoff Barbie (that turned up amidst a pile of Barbies and Barbie accessories that Dave's mom snagged at a yard sale) of Julia’s green because he thinks it would look like Salad Fingers. His far-fetched and often times ridiculous notion that he is just as handy, if not more, than Tim the Toolman Taylor; a self-proclaimed Holmes on Homes. The way he treats our home like a three bedroom, two bath clotheshorse or…the fact that he wiped up pee with Oliver’s pajama shorts on Wednesday night, something that, I’ll admit, I’m still a smidge sore over two days later.

Ding, ding…we have a winner!

See, here’s how it went down. Fresh from the tub and stark naked, Oliver had dashed into his room, then stopped abruptly and peed on the floor. As I walked past the doorway on my way to grab a rag from the linen closet I saw Dave mopping up the puddle with Oliver’s pajama shorts, which just incensed me. Sure, the rational side of me is now able to recognize that really, it’s no big deal. He wiped up Oliver’s pee with Oliver’s shorts – I can see the logic in that. But at that moment my rational side had been beaten to a pulp by my irrational side and, well, I snapped.

Why? Because he wiped up pee with shorts. Shorts. Clothing. Not with the towels earmarked for such disasters in the linen closet, but with our son’s pajama shorts. And when he bunched the shorts up with one of Oliver’s shirts and the soother that got caught under the stream and tossed them all into the hamper in the hall it was like, hello, straw. Meet camel’s back.

I went off; something about could have at least grabbed a hand towel, the bathroom’s right there and make the rest of the clothes in the hamper smell like pee, and I’m pretty sure I did a lot of glaring. He was so casual about it, asking me with the shrug of his shoulders what the big deal was, it was all going to get washed anyway. I turned around and huffed off to the laundry room, muttering obscenities under my breath as I shoved like colours in the machine. Pissed.

But dammit, I know he’s right. Of course the shorts would get washed no matter what; in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter what he used to clean it up with? When it comes to not sweating the small stuff, this is the kind of stuff not to sweat. Oliver peed and Dave cleaned it up. Simple as that, right?

I guess. ~grumble, grumble~

At the very least I need to recognize that he took the initiative and cleaned it up himself, unprovoked. ‘Cause that hardly ever happens around here.