My Nephew's Visit

This weekend my second youngest nephew and his parents came for a visit. Although I knew we would be watching him in while his parents went to a Yankees game, having already baby-proofed my uterus, I never thought about the need to baby-proof our house.

For nap time, we, the trusting, childfree couple that we are, thought, in our infinite wisdom, it would be just fine to put the little one down, alone, in our room while we took a nap in the adjacent office. Now, in all honesty, my motives for putting my nephew to sleep in one room while we took a nap in another room had less to do with him and more to do with my fleeting desire to “get some” while the kid was asleep and his parents were away. However, as soon as my weary beloved and I sank onto the futon, we may as well have had kids of our own for how quickly the thoughts of sex fled our minds as the glory of sleep took over…in the middle of a conversation nonetheless! While we napped we were blissfully oblivious to the quite curiosities of a “sleeping” three-year-old.

Unbeknownst to me, as we slumbered peacefully, my perfect little nephew was surreptitiously teaching one of our cats what we keep in each of our dresser drawers; this despite both himself and the cat knowing that only people are allowed in this room. He was working his way through the bottom drawer, my lingerie drawer, when I stumbled into the room, foolishly thinking he was still asleep. As my befuddled brain tried to process the scene in front of me, my first, sleepy thought was, “How did the cat get in the bedroom and what is my nephew holding in his hand?” This was immediately followed by, “Oh crap, how do I explain to him what is in his hands? Do I lie? Do I tell him it is just lotion? What will my sister do when she finds out? Do I even need to tell her?”

With his wide blue eyes he turned to me and said, “Aunt Elizabeth, what’s this? Can I put it on?” Instantly grateful that he wasn’t talking about my lingerie, I quickly decided to tell him a version of the truth and explained that he was holding a bottle of lotion in his hands and that he doesn’t need that at his age. After all, what three-year-old needs arousal gel anyway? Somewhat satisfied with that answer, he went back to rummaging through the bag of assorted lubes we keep on hand and again asked if he can put some of this mysterious stuff on. I tried to shake the sleep out of my brain and diverted his attention to the bottle of hand lotion on my nightstand. “Here.” I said, “Put this lotion on. It smells really good and it is good for your hands.” Somehow I failed to notice he had already used that bottle. “I know.” He said. “I already tried it.” That was when the last vestiges of sleepiness left my brain and I thought, “Oh, shit, what else did he find in this room?”

I started to open my nightstand drawer, when, without a moment’s hesitation, he told me that he already looked in that drawer and, oh, by the way, “There’s a really big mess on the other side of the room.” I closed the drawer, looked at him, look at the cat, look at the lube that was still in his hand and mentally assessed what is on the other side of the room before slowly asking him what he meant and how the mess got there.

With all the innocence in the world he turned his face to me. “I don’t know.” He said again. “But there is a big mess.” As I got up and walked with him to the other side of the bed, I saw that my darling nephew had gutted my partner’s nightstand and dumped the contents on the floor. In doing so, he discovered our stash of condoms, my beloved’s journal, a Warren Buffet book and the rest of our adult toys. As if that weren’t enough, everything was lying in a heap with some sort of beige colored thing shrouding the pile. It took me a moment to realize not only had he discovered things he was too young to play with, but that he had also unleashed the fury of the Dark Chocolate Raspberry Body Powder. This would explain the sickly sweet scent of fake chocolate permeating the room.

I told myself that I should be angry about this, but truth be told, I never liked the taste of the body powder anyway, and shaking the nearly empty bottle, I realized we would not be using this stuff again. I was also beginning to realize how foolish we were to leave him alone in a room without any kid toys, telling ourselves that he would be just fine. I now understood that the subtle noises I heard in my sleep were not the other cats trying to get out of the bathroom where we had thought to confine them before our naps. No, likely those noises which I instantly dismissed, were the sounds of my nephew’s eager explorations and his inability to get out of the bedroom since I forgot to leave the door ajar and he couldn’t manage the doorknob by himself.

As I sat on the bed and contemplated how to address the situation at hand, I noticed my nephew was preoccupied with something else he discovered and that the cat was about to meander through the chocolate covered pile. I shooed the cat out of the room and asked my nephew if there was anything else he played with in the bedroom. Distractedly he told me no. But when I notice the top of my perfume bottle lying on the floor, I asked him again. Without looking up, he told me that he sprayed that in his eyes and unfazed, went back to playing with whatever was in his hands. Hoping I heard him wrong, since his sense of vision seemed to be fine, I asked him to repeat what he just said. When he did he also offered up that he put on my lipstick (which fortunately was just chapstick) and that it didn’t feel too good to put the perfume in his eyes.

Eventually I gathered my wits about me and remembered that childfree or not, I was supposed to be the adult here. I decided I wasn’t angry at him and instead I felt far more annoyed with myself, but that he needed to take some level of responsibility here. So I told him that he needed to stop playing with whatever is in his hand and clean up the mess he made.

That was when I learned that a child will make a far bigger mess when trying to clean up a pile of powder than if I had just cleaned it myself. In frustration I told him that he had to vacuum the mess up. No problem and no punishment. The kid loves to vacuum! Who knew? He acted like this was his reward for redecorating our room!

When everything was cleaned up and the room smelled a little less like a NutraSweet candy shop, I realized something else was amiss. Not only did my nephew smell like chocolate, chapstick and my perfume, but apparently I forgot to ask him if he needed to go to the bathroom before he took a nap and since I had inadvertently trapped him in our bedroom, he relieved himself in his pants. As we trudged off to the bathroom I reminded myself for the zillionth time all the ways in which I am not equipped to handle this parenting stuff and I began counting down the hours until I could hand Curious George over to his more qualified handlers, I mean, parents.