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May 21, 2003

OxyClean saved my son's life

It's a rare day when a preschooler lets his parents sleep until noon on a Sunday. It's an ever more rare day when he doesn't destroy something while they're sleeping. Those days are so rare that I haven't encountered one yet.

This past Sunday was one of the much more common days when you wake up and look at the clock, realize it's noon and groan with happiness that you've been able to sleep for so long. Then you go into the bathroom and notice tiny red fingerprints on the foamy soap dispenser and the stepstool. At first, you think "Blood! Who's bleeding!" But then you take a closer look and the fingerprints are sticky and pasty -- and a shade of red that has only been found in veins on the silver screen. "What is this stuff?"

Next you head into the kitchen where there are more gooey red marks on the hard-to-clean wood part (Never the glass. Never ever the easy-to-clean glass.) of the kitchen table. You call out to your preschooler, "Trev? Where are you and what is this all over the house?"

At the sound of the phrase, "all over the house", your husband bounds out of bed, wishing to witness the destruction firsthand. You both crouch near the soiled table and decide that it's red ink from a Chinese chop set. Not AC Moore stamp pad ink which is thin and starts to run on a humid day. This is thick Chinese ink paste, bought thirteen years ago in Stanley Market, Hong Kong and made from a recipe older than America itself. It's the same ink that kings and emporers used to make chop signatures on their official documents and it laughs in the face of Windex with Bleach.

While you're scrubbing with futility, your preschooler enters from the living room with his hands hidden behind his back. Which is never a good sign. Your husband demands them front and center and they are slimy with ink. He is sent to the bathroom and your husband checks out the living room.

"Oh my god, what did you do?!" comes the shout you were half expecting. You run in to find that the offending preschooler has used your couch, carpet and coffee table as canvases for three distinct works of art. The green couches now have red handprint accents ground deep into the bumpy tweed-like fabric. On one cushion he experimented with circles. The coffee table appears to be a staging area, where excess ink was rubbed off before application to the couches. The light gray carpeting was apparently an acceptable substitute for a moist towelette -- it was used to clean all painting implements after the work was complete.

The boy knows that this is potentially the worst trouble he has ever been in. He feezes in the hallway and you hope that he's thinking to himself, "What I did was wrong. I'm responsible and I'll never do it again." But what he's really thinking is more along the lines of, "I like snacks."

You send him into his room and banish him to the bed for the rest of the day. You confer with your husband and you both agree that if you killed him, someone would probably notice. So you take out the OxyClean instead and pray that it has the power to save your child's life. After two hours of scrubbing, those enigmatic enzymes have dissolved every trace of the paste ink -- and the preschooler is napping quietly in his bed. Thank you OxyClean. If he knew, Trevor would thank you too.

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