The Glitter Incident
It had been a long week. I just want to throw that out there. It had been a long and fairly stressful week.
School ended the week before and summer camp was still a week away. I had a pile of freelance work to do before we headed off on vacation. The child had been spending the week largely on her own. I was in the house and available for deathly emergencies (and snack preparation), but she had to entertain herself.
I had been to Michaels Craft Store and picked up $40 worth of random crafty stuff. Among that stuff was a black tee shirt and some fabric glitter glue. The idea was that she could decorate the tee shirt.
Today — after no fewer than 50 pipe cleaner “braids” had been constructed and used to decorate the house — we got to the tee shirt.
“OK, honey,” I said, laying down the tee shirt on the dining room table. “Just take this glue and draw like you would with a crayon.” I opened the box with the glitter glue as she danced around the room singing “I’m going to make a Beatles tee shirt! How do you spell Beatles, Mommy?”
Hmmm. The stuff looked a little… well… loose. I turned the box over and read it. The tiny words on the back of the box said it was meant to be used with their fabric glue.
Oh crap.
I opened one of the bottles (there were 4, of different colors) and poured a little of the stuff out on to my hand. It was glitter. Just plain, loose glitter — in a dust so incredibly fine that even the movement of air from my “oh crap” moved it around my hand.
Oh, crap, crap, crap.
I looked at the clock. I really, really needed to work this morning and we were definitely out of pipe cleaners to braid.
“What’s the matter, Mom?”
I shook my head. “Nothing. I just need to get some of my fabric glue. It’ll be fine.”
I got the glue and, as fast as I could, I spelled out Beatles. “OK, honey. Just take the glitter and dump it out on the letters,” I said, figuring the best thing was to use up all of the glitter at once. I could just dump the excess glitter on the back yard later. “OK? I have to get to work. Have fun, OK?”
“OK, Mommy.”
I went to work. The quietness from the other room made me think that my plan had succeeded. I heard some maniacal giggling. Oh, good, I thought. She’s finished with the glitter and is playing with the dog.
I bent back down. I just needed to finish this batch of images….
“Mommy! Look at me!” She skipped in and bent over so I could see the top of her head. Her scalp was orange — fluorescent orange — and her hair was covered in glitter.
“Oh, baby. What did you do?”
“I glittered myself!” she said proudly. Then she bent over again and shook her head, showering me with glitter. “Wait,” she said, “until you see the dog!”
The dog trotted in right on cue. He was green. Green and glittering. “He’s green,” I said (somewhat redundantly). “We have obedience training tonight. I don’t want to take a green sparkling dog to obedience training.”
The child shrugged.
I went into the dining room, following the magical pixie glitter path all the way across the house. I could see the spots where the dog had stopped and shaken himself off.
The tee shirt we had been working on was an inch deep with multi-colored glitter.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to remind myself that this was all my idea. I told her to just “dump it all out” and — in all fairness — I did not specify that she should not dump it all out on the dog. This was a predictable outcome and, honestly could have been a lot worse.
The carpet could have been an inch deep in glitter.
I opened my eyes. The child was standing in front of me. “Am I in trouble?”
“It’s OK, baby, but we need to get this cleaned up. Let’s start with the dog.”
We took the dog to the front porch and brushed and pushed the poor dog around until most of the glitter was gone. He still sparkled, but he was no longer green.
The child, however, was still orange.
“Sweetheart? You want to take a shower?”
She shook her head in horror. “NOOOOOO!!”
I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “OK. Let’s dump the glitter from the tee shirt.”
“Can I do it?” she asked brightly.
“NOOOOOOO!” I said, grabbing the tee shirt and folding it carefully. “You can open the door.”
We left the hosta sparkling in the late June sun.
When we picked up my husband at Metro, he asked us if we did anything exciting today.
“We glittered!” the child tittered.
“We had a Glitter Incident,” I groaned.
“On a scale of 1 to 5 and 5 being the worst,” he asked, “what level Glitter Incident are we talking about?”
“A number 4 incident,” I said, thinking back to the green dog. “Definitely level 4.”
We figure the stuff has a household half-life of about 6 months.
