Flash From The Past: The Mommy Moments You Never Forget

I think as mommies we all feel like we get a good portion of these memories. Those delightful trips to the store, that end abruptly with a huge drawn out tantrum in front of everyone. The accidents in the pants when you're dragging three screaming kids through a store, trying to get to the exit, and they give you only three seconds to find them a bathroom. The wonderful days they decide to play hairdresser on their favorite dolls, or best yet themselves. The beautiful murals they draw all over the walls with permanent marker. I could go on… there are plenty. For five years of my life, that is approx. 1825 days, it felt like I was loaded with those mommy memories daily.
There is also an abundant amount of good mommy memories… but like always I am going to focus on the bad ones. You can get the good ones from the other bazillion bloggers out there. Lol.
Well… I tend to get all the average mommy moments and then I am privileged enough to get a lot of bonuses. The ones that don’t happen to just everyone, they are special. Like the last memory I shared where Seth so kindly peed in my drinking cup… you know SPECIAL memories.
Anyway… I call them “Kailey’s Why Me’s”. And today I am going to share another one of those special memories with you.

In our last home we had a sunroom that our cats and the bazillion other cats around called home. They got in through a doggy door on the side of the house. It was closed off so that they couldn’t get into the house, but it got them out of the rain and bad weather. Well it didn’t take long for the cats to spread the word to the other wild animals around that as long as they could fit through the door they could come and eat all of our cat food. While we were vacationing at Lake Powell one year we got a call from my mother saying that Pepe Le Pew had taken up residence with the cats in the sunroom. Pepe Le Pew was a frequent visitor from that time on.
The dog next door loved to corner him under our bedroom window. There were many stinky sleepless nights from those “doggy” adventures. There was also a bit of a commotion one day in the sunroom. I ran and opened the sunroom door to see what was going on in there… well it seemed that the skunk had got in a fight with our cat Bootsie and had sprayed her seconds before I opened the door. My house smelt for weeks after that. The poor cat smelt for months and had swollen eyes for a very long time. But none of these stinky adventures was anything like the mommy moment that would soon follow.

After the skunk sprayed Bootsie the kids took out a vendetta against it. They wanted to make sure that it paid for its blunder. Right about this time we started seeing Pepe Le Pew EVERYWHERE. He would walk around the yard during daylight like he owned the place. It gave the kids ample opportunities to chase it out of the yard. At first they kept their distance from it, because I had told them it was a very dangerous creature. As they got more use to seeing it and chasing it away they got more “brave” with it.

One day I am sitting on the computer when I hear a conversation going on between the kids about how stupid the skunk is and that they want to teach it a lesson to not ever come back and bother our cats. “Let’s throw rocks at it” one of them said. “No, lets hit it with a stick” another said. “Why don’t we do both” was the final comment. Remeber these are all kids under 9 years of age. I reminded them that we don’t mess around with skunks, but you know I am just the mom so they never listen to me. They are the type of kids that like to find everything out the hard way. Well, it was only a few hours later when Pepe Le Pew shows back up in the yard. You never have seen kids so excited.
I was pretty much ignoring them doing something when I hear them gathering up the backup. “Who is going with me?” “OK, let’s go”. Now I should have been paying more attention to what they were doing, but I was in the middle of something and I wasn't "really" listening to them and so I didn’t think much of it. All I knew was that the three younger kids were playing outside while James was sitting on the couch watching TV. All of a sudden I hear a bunch of screaming and the three younger kids burst through the door. That is when I learned how talented skunks were with their stink. All three of them had been sprayed. Since they so kindly ran right into the house, the house immediately filled up with skunk smell. I sent them straight to the bathroom and had them jump in the shower with their clothes on.
You know when you are driving by a dead skunk and it really smells. Well amplify that smell like by 300%. That is what my kids smelled like. I had to stop and throw up for a minute before I could continue to help them get de-smelly. It was such a disgustingly strong smell. Their clothes (which some of them had on relatively new ones), had to be thrown out after washing them in all sorts of things over and over again, the smell never went away. The kids had to soak in vinegar and tomato juice for a couple of hours. They still smelt for days and they whined about it all the time. Even when I could no longer smell them they could still smell the smell on themselves. I think they had absorbed it into their senses. ;-)

Interestingly enough Pepe Le Pew kept his distance after that. We could still smell him every once in a while and on occasion we saw him, but he took the long way around the house instead of the shortcut through the backyard. Maybe three kids throwing rocks at him and hitting him with sticks wasn’t too bad of an idea… BUT I wouldn’t recommend it as the way to get rid of skunks!