In a period of 6 or so weeks, I have had to call Poison Control for the Hoo 3 times.  Yes, THREE.  Luckily Pilot was here for the first one.  I had been keeping our vitamins on the counter, near the coffee, so you know, I would actually remember to take them.  The Hoo has a little stool she uses in the kitchen to ‘help’ me cook, which really involves over spicing food and stirring sauces onto the counter-but I love her helping me because she LOVES it.  Since Pipes is still nursing down for a nap, I turn on some Blue’s Clues, plop the Hoo on the couch with her milk and a little snack, and take care of Pipes.  I thought the vitamins were pushed back far enough.  We had also told her time and time again that medicines can make you sick and not to touch them.  Never underestimate a determined toddler.

I came downstairs to a grinning Hoo with her hands in the supposedly ‘child-proof’ (she has been able to open child-proof caps since she was 14 months old) bottle of gummy vitamins.  She had eaten nearly half, with her chipmunk cheeks stuffed full.  According to Poison Control, ODing on gummy vitamins is a fairly common occurrence with the preschool set.  She warned me that her stomach was going to be a little bit upset.

That was a flipping understatement.  Within 2 hours, during naptime in MY bed with no plastic protector on the mattress, the vomiting started.  I had no idea a toddler could puke that much.  You know those classic fountains where the statues have water spilling out of their mouths?  Yeah, it was like that only peppered with bits of partially digested gummy bears mixed in.  I had to shower her with her shirt on at first because it was so saturated with vomit.

Pilot and I were hoping that episode would be the worst of it.  We thought, fingers crossed, that she would have gotten most of the vitamins out of her system.  Boy, we were wrong.

Now that was the only time she puked.  The next morning the shit fountain started.  I’m talking newborn-esqe blowouts that were up to the shoulders and down to the knees.  Just pure mush.  The worst was unlike having the stomach flu runs, she felt fine enough to eat normally.  And she is a good eater.  Thank God it happened on a weekend and Pilot took care of the worst of it-cleaning her.  I got to wash mounds of poopy laundry.  I seriously noticed a difference in our water bill from that one weekend.  To top it off, she also got an ear infection from the vomit getting deep in her ear since she threw up while lying down.  The antibiotic tore her stomach up for the next 10 days, but the blowouts were mostly over.  And I got to sit on her to get the drops in her ears.  Good times all around.

The next time I had to call, I thought that I had her beat.  All the vitamins & meds had been placed in a basket on the very top shelf on the pantry where she would need specialized pantry scaling equipment to climb.  I hid her stool and the one in the bathroom.  She was secure in her room at night with a ‘childproof’ knob on the door.  I had a baby gate on the bottom of the steps that was always up to keep dogs and kiddos from treating the upstairs like they do the downstairs part of the house, or to contain them upstairs.

Have you ever heard of the Swiss cheese effect?  You know where little things happen, like holes in Swiss cheese, and if you line them up just right, you have a perfect hole straight through?  Well, that would be this incident.

I take my prenatals at night.  Since the girls aren’t up when I take them, I had left the basket out.  With Pilot being gone, the dogs are in bed with me.  I move the gate at the steps so they can get up to my room without me breaking my back by lifting 40lbs of weiner (yeah, you got that right, I have big, fat, fuzzy weiners in between my legs every night, oh yeah).  I had forgotten to put it back up.  Her knob was on, but she had figured out how to get it off and break free.  She had decided to bypass my room, with the open door right next to the steps to see what havoc she could wreck downstairs.  The stools were gone, but her mini shopping cart was out, along with all her play food that she had thrown in there to make it high enough to climb in and get to the counter where she got into my prenatals.

Thank God this didn’t turn out as bad as it could have.  She told me she had eaten them.  After some calls back and forth with Poison Control and the pharmacy we figured out that at  most she could have ingested 4.  She would have to eat 12 to start to get iron toxicity, and 24 before it would become take her to the hospital now type deal.  But it was another ban on vitamins for the week & upset stomach deal, only not at all to the previous level.  God took pity on me.

The third time I thought I had her beat for good.  It was naptime for Pipes, so I had moved everything I thought she could possibly use as leverage out in the garage.  All medicines were up high.  We were good.

Then I came downstairs to a grinning Hoo digging into a bottle of Tums.  Tums!  They are such a fixture with me being pregnant that I didn’t even consider them something to be put up.  I mean Tums!  She had gotten into the pantry, drug out the dog food container, and used that to climb on the counter.  It was in this call that I asked about cross reporting to CPS since they get your name and phone number with every call.  The laughing guy on the other end told me not to worry.  I don’t have the only crazy creative child out there.  This time was a ban on milk and another upset stomach.

Now this hasn’t been the only times I have had to call PC for her.  The first?  She ate some Excedrin that had been through the washer in Pilot’s flight suits that left her foaming at the mouth.  Then she drank some liquid Tylenol and tried to cover it up by closing the bottle.  The red liquid all over the floor, her mouth, and the bottle kinda gave her away.  There have been other calls, but probably the most insane one was when she was on medication for sticking her hand into a fire ant mound.  I had the ‘child-proof’ bottle on her dresser which was about 3-4 feet away from her crib.  During her nap, she had grabbed the side of her crib and somehow managed to scoot the crib over to the dresser, stack her books up, and get to the bottle where she drank it.  I just had to watch her from excessive drowsiness.  Her doctor called in a new prescription for 2 bottles instead of one.  She knows my children well.

I am expecting this to happen:

Ahh, any day now kiddo.

What crazy things do your kids get into?