Minimally Toxic

It was a dark and stormy night.

Okay, it wasn’t actually stormy but it might as well have been because it was 10:30pm, all three children were awake, my husband was travelling for work and I was trying to rock the baby to sleep while simultaneously googling poison control.

We had spent the day partying with friends as wildly as homeschool four and five year olds know how to party and had ended the day with at least double our recommended daily sugar intake, Happy Meals for dinner and leftover party glow sticks to bring to bed. If you ask my kids, it was a good day.

And now it was bedtime. (Cue the foreboding music.)

While I don’t have early risers, bedtime never goes smoothly (or early) in our house. Never. My kids have been night owls since infancy and while I have (mostly) accepted this, I was still expecting bedtime on this night to be extra special.

Despite my apprehension, we all survived snack time, clean up and our nightly resist-pajamas-and-smear-toothpaste-in-the-sink routine with surprisingly little chaos. I’d told the big girls to read quietly in their rooms while I nursed the baby, hoping she would fall asleep. (She didn’t.)

The big girls were chatting just loudly enough for me to be aware that, while they were not exactly reading quietly, they were also not getting into trouble and I counted that as a win. I finished nursing the baby and brought her into the room her sisters shared so I could turn the light off and play a little musical rocking chairs, making sure everyone stayed in their beds and hoping the baby was lulled to sleep by my rocking. Multitasking at its finest.

I was about to turn the light off when I noticed it: a little girl under a blanket with a guilty look on her face.

This was odd. They usually want to show off their elaborate bedtime glow stick set ups, not to hide them.

Suspicions roused, I poked the guilty blanket and detected a fluorescent smear. 

10:25pm. Leaking glow stick. Everyone still awake.

In the now darkened room, I also find a streak on her pajamas and a spot on her chin. 

“What happened to your glow stick?” I asked with as much gentleness as I could manage, attempting to sound less alarmed than I was. “Did you bite it?"

Silence.

She bit it.

After some coaxing, she assured me she didn’t swallow much and informed me that glow sticks taste like “a stinky sock with some oil on it and some yogurt in it.” Oddly specific.

I threw out the offending glow stick, checked her teeth for any other evidence, had her swish and spit with a glass of water, mustered my best poker face to convince her that it was a small amount and she wouldn’t get sick and tucked her in bed. I sat down in the rocking chair with the baby and opened a 25th tab on my phone to ask Google if she knew whether my child had just poisoned herself. 

It turns out, glow sticks are only minimally toxic. They just taste terrible. Cue the sigh of relief.

(Also reassuring were the pages and pages of children’s hospital websites detailing this minimal toxicity. Apparently mine is not the only child in North American to ingest “stinky sock with some yogurt on it and some oil on it.”)

Still, the image of her hiding stuck with me. She knew glow sticks were not food and while she wasn’t particularly concerned about getting in trouble, she was worried about whether she would be ok. But instead of showing me the mess and asking about her fate, she hid.

This wasn’t a hide-your-baby-from-Pharoah endeavour. It was more akin to hide-because-you-ate-the-fruit-and-now-you-realize-you’re-naked secrecy. I knew the look, and the feeling.

See, we hide too—behind blankets and sarcasm and politics and a grid full of tidy squares—fearing our often minimally toxic messes when all we really want to know is, “Am I going to be ok?”