Miss Mischief

So yesterday morning I am nursing Matthew. My mom is at our house for a few hours, generously giving her time away and scouring my bathroom. Meg is running back and forth from the master bedroom, where Mom is, to Matthew's room, where I am. She's having a blast alternating between Nana and Mama and playing peekaboo with both. After one appearance in Matthew's room, Meg grabs the door and pulls it shut, leaving me closed inside. I think about getting up to open the door, since she can only close, not open, but decide against it when I hear her footsteps pounding back toward Nana. I figure that she will be just fine playing near Mom--and for a while, she is.

Minutes go by--not very many, but enough. Suddenly, the door to Matthew's room opens, and in walks my mother, carrying Meg. Meg, as you may have guessed from the picture above, has some mysterious black stuff all over her. She is also eating one of my mom's lipsticks. At first Mom and I think that the black stuff must be mascara. But after some investigation, it turns out to be... charcoal. Charcoal? Yes.

It seems that Meg has gone downstairs, unzipped my mom's purse (which Mom had carefully zipped and removed to a location where she thought it would be safe), and pulled out her pill case. You know those plastic things that have a little box for every day of the week? Well, Meg has discovered my mom's and helped herself to one item from "Friday". It's a capsule filled with charcoal, which my mom takes as a digestive aid. Fortunately, it's completely harmless, even if Meg managed to swallow any--and she probably didn't, since there appears to be at least one capsule's worth smeared on her face, hands and clothes. Amazingly, she didn't get charcoal on anything but herself--or lipstick. That's mercy number one. I guess mercy number two is that she only managed to get one pill before we found her. And the lipstick turns out to be a rather old and crusty one that my mom rarely uses any more. Mercy number three.

Mercy number four--by far the greatest--was that God allowed Meg get hold of a pill case belonging to my mother!! Anyone else's medicinal stock would surely yield something to harm my little daughter. But the only things my health-foody Mom ever takes are herbal and other natural remedies for tummy problems. Praise the Lord! That's one disaster averted, one little girl miraculously unharmed, and one mommy... hopefully the wiser for it.