When Your Kids Mistake Lube For Slime: A Cautionary Tale

Before I start with this shitshow of a parenting story that is my life, I think it’s fair to preface this by saying that I have two sets of twins who are three years apart — to the very day.

You know how in the movies and books, twins are always the ones to instigate the trouble (Fred and George Weasley, Phil and Lil DeVille, Preston and Porter Scavo, etc.)? Well, as my twins are growing, I’m learning that this isn’t some far-fetched Hollywood stereotype — it’s the real deal.

Because twins, or at least my feral bunch of them, are a skeaky-sneaky bunch. They feed off of each other, and they do not give a flying ferret’s patootie about getting into trouble because they know they always have a buddy to get into trouble with.

Even from a young age, it seems my twins — particularly my oldest set — have held their fists up together in solidarity. When they were itty-bitty, they both presented me with blowout diapers reaching their hair, without fail, at the same exact time. They’ve eaten more crayons than I can count. And they are always, no matter how many baths they are given, running around with dirty and dusty feet and legs.

But the latest mishap is actually my fault. You see, I’m a lube user. I’m not dried up like some dehydrated camel (not that there would be anything wrong with that if I were), but I love myself, so I use lube. Wouldn’t you know…the last time I used it, I tossed it off the bed in the heat of the moment and couldn’t find where it was thrown that night. Or the next morning.

Get my ‘Parent of the Year’ trophy all shined up, because my oldest set of twins, of course, did find it.

I was upstairs tending to my younger set of twins’ bedtime needs the following night while my husband was at work and my older set of twins were tucked in on the couch with a snack, a movie, and some juice. Every couple of minutes, I would peek my head out of the doorway and whisper-scream down the stairs to check on them, causing the dogs to bark and them to yell, “STOP IT, DOGS! No one is here!” (I have no idea where they learned that from.)

When the “littles” were finally sleepy, I made my way downstairs to start my long list of nightly to-dos. At first, and as always, I glanced in the living room to see my once tucked-in kids who were now up making a mess of my living room. Typical.

Due to the half-columns in our house and the platform they sit on, I couldn’t see the floor. But what I could see were the tops of my kids’ heads and their baby dolls’ heads, all lined up like many ducks in a row. Innocent enough.

I made my way into the kitchen without fully investigating or interrupting their play, and returned a phone call while rinsing the dishes. And after too much silence, it happened: A loud boom, followed by a slide and my son’s boisterous, “WOO-HOO!”

All I could think was, oh shit. For these are the same give-me-a-damn-heart-attack sounds I hear post-bath as my son runs and slides his naked, slippery bum across our laminate hallway like he’s scoring a winning homerun.

Man, oh man, did that feeling of dread hit me hard. What the hell did they get into?

I did my best pissed-off-angry-mom-march into the living room and nearly busted my ass while doing so.

Because … lube. So. Much. Lube.

My lube. The entire container of it.

The KY bottle laid alone, sad and empty, while its guts were copiously dished out into multiple toddler bowls and being fed right into the mouths of my kids’ poor, never-to-recover-again baby dolls.

The slippery goo was in my son’s hair, on both my son’s and my daughter’s clothes, and all over my throw pillows (which I’m sure are lube-stained forever and ever). Gobs of the glistening gloss painted my hardwood floor, making my living room look like some sort of exotic, after-hours Slip n’ Slide.

Feeling equal parts horrified and humored, I hollered, “WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING?!”

My daughter, the one whom I’m more than certain initiated this lube-fest-fiasco, jerked her head up and gleefully exclaimed with lube covering her rump, arms, hands, feet, cheeks and legs, “PLAYING WITH SLIME!”

Meanwhile, my son is getting a running start from the dining room so he can belly flop and slide through the living room.

FML.

Seeing as I couldn’t stand in one spot without my feet involuntarily sliding beneath me, I attempted to clean the floor a bit first. But here’s the problem: Lube. Doesn’t. Absorb. And the more that I tried to clean it, the worse this shit seemed to get, y’all.

I felt like the Cat in the Hat trying to clean up all that purple splat. Towels weren’t absorbing it, they were just smearing it. And while I was trying to tend to my slippery living room, Thing 1 and Thing 2 decided it would be a good idea to make it rain lube with their bad case of jazz hands, which frantically wiggled about while they giddily laughed and screamed, “LOOK AT ALL THE SLIME!”

They were, of course, ecstatic. But from where I was sitting, they looked like some boy/girl twin-version from The Shining.

New mission: Clean Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

We miraculously made it to the bathroom without a fall, leaving a glistening trail in our wake. After scooping the lube off the floor with my bare hands, I mopped it three times, but my kids were still slipping and every print was now visible.

I asked my friends for any and all suggestions on how to remove lube from hardwood, and a friend’s husband offered, “Just keep rubbing it.”

Of course.

When all was said and done, and we had some good giggles and sore cheeks from laughing, my daughter sighed, shrugged her shoulders, and remarked to me, “Sorry, babies just like slime.”

Damn you, YouTube videos, damn you.