When I was about, oh, three years old, apparently I snuck into the bathroom while my mother was taking a nap (and thought I was, too) and managed to get my hands on her makeup and end up covering myself and the bathroom with it.  Quite literally red-handed thanks to the lipstick, I vigorously denied touching her makeup at all.

A few days ago, I got proof that the force runs strong within my family, at least when it comes to mishaps involving cosmetics.

Having put the boy to sleep in our bed as per usual, Eric and I went downtairs to watch the somewhat forgettable yet moderately entertaining “Bollywood Hero.”  About an hour later, Eric goes upstairs to check on the kids, and shortly yells downstairs “You have to get up here right now!” Worried that some mortal ill has befallen our children, I race upstairs, only to find the bathroom covered in plum nail polish.  It is dripped onto the tiles and sink, dried on the sink handles and bowl, and there is a puddle of it in the middle of the bathroom spilling over onto the grout.

I go to see the boy who is sleeping in our bed with the cover pulled up just over his hands.  I wake him up and he brings his hands out from under the duvet, entirely covered in dried nail polish.  He also has a few streaks between his toes. I can’t help myself–I start laughing, because the situation is just too ridiculous for words.  We get the boy in the bathroom, who keeps answering “I don’t know” or “I didn’t do it” to all queries, and Eric intermittently yelling at him.  Initially I use nail polish remover but then realize that I don’t want my child to get acetone poisoning so I just scrub his hands and feet and get it off of his skin as best as I can.  We get the boy to sleep in his own bed and then finish cleaning up the rest.

Trying to figure out what happened, we trace the drops of polish from the bathroom, over the carpet, to the nightstand, which we find has polish dripped all inside the drawer.  Our nice Room&Board nightstand, no less.

To then piece together what happened, the nail polish was in the nightstand for some reason (Eric’s side, I might add) and the boy just HAD to know what it was.  He must have opened it, it started to spill, and then I can just hear his little brain going, “Oh shit oh shit oh shit” (or whatever sanitized toddler version he speaks in his head) and get it into the bathroom as quickly as possible, where he dropped the bottle on the floor and created the puddle, and then tried to clean it up with his hands, only to find that it dried on his hands and all surfaces.  Panicking, he gave up and went to bed, carefully covering his hands with the comforter, and hoping we wouldn’t notice.

The aftermath: