Saturday, October 25, 2008

Nasty.

So, this is one for the story books.

The Kid is all shifty eyed and anxious last night. I ask him what he's up to. He flails and avoids me for about an hour. He comes up to me at about 6:30 and says, I can't even tell you what I did. Just go to my room and look in my toybox.

What am I going to find? A severed head? A hideous stain on his nice pants? Something dear to me cut up to pieces? Who knows, but I know one thing. This ain't good, my friends.

I go down and open the toybox. A hideous stench hits me, and there is nothing in the toybox but one of my bigger pyrex bowls, filled with a nasty yellowish water. You know that part in The Shining when he goes into that bathroom and finds the scary dead body in the bathtub? That comes screaming to mind and I freak out and run out of the room and go get him.

WHAT IS THAT? I ask.. He says, look on the bottom. We go back to the toybox, I pick up the bowl gingerly, so as to spill none of this who-knows-what on, well, anything, and lift it up to look at the bottom of the bowl. There is nastiness on the bottom of the bowl, but I still don't know what the frak it is.

WHAT IS THIS, KID? I say with restrained rage, wondering if I now need to worry about him being a sociopath or something. The Kid replies, "You know in Spongebob the movie how they come back to life with water?"

It instantly comes to me. My mom has a propensity towards tchochkes. I HATE them, but there is shit all over this house, loads of nativity scenes (we are sooo catholic), little pottery pieces and vases, bowls with rocks in them, and then there's this one pretty little round glass vase, filled with shells, sand dollars and yes, a starfish. Or rather, there used to be a starfish in that little round vase. The Kid was trying to revive my mom's dried starfish. A dried starfish I have a feeling she picked up decades ago during a family vacation before I was even born. I made him dump the water out and clean the bowl. Nasty nasty nasty. It smelled like, oh, ancient saltwater and rancid liver mixed together or something. We both wretched about 12 times. It was by far, the most disgusting thing I've encountered as a parent, and you have to remember, I'm the mom of the kid who puked almost daily for four years. I'd clean buckets full of vomit before I ever, ever have to encounter re-wetted ancient dried starfish, ever again. Oy.

Oh, and for the record? I have no idea when he performed this operation. I have NO IDEA how long the starfish was in that bowl, in his toybox, in his room. Ew.

7 comments:

Em said...

This is just too funny. And gross. And I can definitely identify with that moment..."what did my kid kill and will I have to tell anyone about it?"

Leslie Dillinger said...

Oh my God. HILARIOUS.

Kelley @ magneto bold too said...

OH GOD! That is nasty and hilarious! Like the time that Boo heard about The Resurrection at school. His poor little literal mind could not take in that information and I found him putting rocks on dead flies to see if they came to life...

But that didn't smell. I can only IMAGINE what that smelled like. Scratch that, I cannot imagine. Ew.

Mr Lady said...

So long as he doesn't ever ride The Hasselhoff, you're all good.

Rachel said...

I am dying. Especially as my daughter picked up about 13 live starfish at the beach and hid them in a bucket that got left in my car in the Texas heat for days. I cannot even begin to describe the foulness.

UGH.

ms. bliss said...

Ewwwww

jess said...

Just stumbled over from... somewhere. When I was a kid my sister & I kept peach pits as pets one time until they started to smell, very very badly. Yeah, we were weird kids. ;)

I think it's kinda sweet that he was trying to reanimate the starfish though.