Golf balls

Last week my husband was out of town and I was flying solo w/my three for a couple of days. I go into supermom mode when he's away and clean more than usual, perhaps just to show him up in some twisted way. Anyway, I actually cleaned the high chairs.

Let me just issue a caveat here: I am a disgusting slob. And I look like Mrs. Clean compared to J-sh. Before blogs I wanted to have a 'zine called "dysfunctional living." Every month it would have a centerfold picture of the worst mess in my house that month. Never got around to it.

Anyway, H-nry's high chair is a Peg Perego Prima Pappa that we inherited from some people we barely knew in Brooklyn. For those of you low-rent MF's out there, let me enlighten you: the Prima Pappa [hereinafter "PP"] is the fanciest (i.e. expensive) high chair on the market. Apparently, people find its look less offensive than gaudier, less expensive alternatives, like perhaps a tacky Americana one from, God-forbid, Graco. Maybe Italian babies are cleaner than mine, or maybe fashion rules over function in Italy and in the lives of Stateside PP parents, but IMO, this highchair is a complete piece of shit. And not in the normal POS way - it has millions of unimaginable crevices and grooves which seem to serve no purpose other than for food to get stuck in. So put this in our house and what do you get? a) maggots? or b) mold? Answer: both. Although, to our credit, not at the same time (yet).

When S-phie was a baby, we had a fruit fly problem. It sucked because we had to really really really clean the whole house. But the fruit flies remained. We were stumped. Finally, I traced their flight paths back to the high chair. But it was spotless. Still, my observations revealed that they definitely came from the high chair. Further investigation, which involved using a screwdriver to unscrew little plates in the seat of the chair, revealed pits of teeming maggots in these little compartments under the screwed-in plates. I told you this highchair is a fucking nightmare. And do rest assured that the maggots were one of my all-time parenting lowpoints. But I blame the PP. We moved S-phie to a booster seat w/no maggot pits.

Hating the PP with a passion, I would have gotten rid of it, but instead I lent the evil chair to Ben, of the Trixie Update (now I know how to do links). I had bleached the whole thing several times, so only told him about the maggot incident after they were done using it. I would not have taken it back at all, except I was pg with twins and it just didn't seem practical to buy 2 new highchairs. But being no fool, this time I made sure to periodically lift the seat cover and dump a little bleach into the maggot pits and to clean around them. However, last week when I was in my extreme cleaning mode, I took the whole seat cover off (extreme, I know) and this time, in the back of the seat (the maggot pits are near the front), where the straps go through the seat cover, there were two balls of mold, each the size of a golf ball.

Which got me to thinking. You know how sometimes you think, why must there be roaches in the world? Or posion ivy? Or maggots? What purpose do they serve? And then you realize it's some bigger picture, food chain type of thing and let it go. Well, I feel that way about golf. That it's just weird and annoying and serves no purpose. But when I saw the golfball-sized mold balls, I had an epiphany: the golfball is a critical measurement tool. Golfball-sized hail, a tumor the size of a golf ball, or mold like a golf ball. A ping-pong ball is the same size, I suppose, but ping pong is wimpy, as are the balls, that can be crushed between our spindly fingers, rather than inflicting serious injury like the mighty golfball. This revelation, which has helped me make peace with golf and its representativies, really made me feel better about the whole mold thing. And, I thought, at least there weren't golfballs of maggots. I'm getting better at parenting.