The Joys of Parenting

So when did I grow up?

Last week, my vacuum cleaner died and I was angry…Why? Because vacuum cleaners are expensive! And I don’t have that kind of money to throw around… But wait…There’s more…Then my wireless router died, and yes, a wireless router that we DON’T need, but that my husband insists we have so that we can carry the laptop around the house… WHY? I don’t know… Even in the past when we had carried it around he was always ultra protective of how it was treated… Men! Hhmm…Regardless, I was livid, because now we have to replace a vacuum AND a wireless router and “money don’t grow on trees”, or so I told my husband…I have groceries to buy and other things we require to run this house and just don’t have this kind of spare cash lying around on my husband’s single income supporting a family of six…

So then my 1 year old… my Emma poo…the happiest baby you will ever meet… sickeningly cute and charming….decides to take a cup of water, carelessly left on the side table with the laptop RIGHT THERE, turned on, and gave my $2000 laptop a bath, frying every electrical component inside instantly…

I swear, you could have heard a pin drop in the house at that moment… When my poor husband and I rounded the corner only to see her sitting on the couch, cup in hand, laptop now sitting in a pool of water…

We could not believe it… We just paid this stupid thing off!! No, this cannot be happening!!  I’m thinking as I watch my husband try to dry it off and try and boot it up, groaning every time he opened a new compartment and found more water…

Jesse and Sarah (2 ½ twins) were silent, standing on the other side of the room, not daring to make a peep and somehow implicate themselves in the big heap of trouble their little sister was about to get in… All they said was “Emma poured water on the ‘puter’”….Little buggers! They probably egged her on…

I watch the error messages continue to pop up on the screen, a sinking feeling in my gut, knowing I had over 9000 pictures that I have taken over the past 7 years on that laptop… I am notorious for snapping every moment of every one of my children’s lives, visually documenting everything for all those things that I may have forgot… The horrible feeling only got worse when I remembered that both of my novels were on there as well.  I am currently contracted with an erotica publisher and is really just something I have recently gotten into, to prevent my mind from turning to mush, the ONLY recent copies of those works, were on that laptop, with significant revisions that not even my publisher had copies of…

With all this going through my head, this absolute horror… I felt a strange calm over me… My mind was going a mile a minute, but I really was not mad at Emma… In fact I felt it was my fault for leaving my drink on the table in the first place… My husband and I were foolishly lulled into a safe place with the twins being old enough to understand not to touch anything on the table and Emma just recently learning how to climb up on the couch… If it was not my water she grabbed, it would have been my husband’s orange pop that she would have dumped for it was sitting right beside my water when we both walked out of the room…

I looked to my husband, to try and gauge his mood, and although he looks worried, he too, has that same sense of calm about him… All we could do was shrug our shoulders at each other… It was our Emma poo… What are we really going do? Had it been him that did that to the laptop or vice versa, we probably would have been freaking at the other… We just did not have it in us to be mad… Actually we were a little embarrassed, realizing it was both of our faults…  So what do I do…. Nothing… She could have been electrocuted… It’s just a computer… I just shrugged my shoulders…

When I had to go buy a new one and add it to the bill with the vacuum and the router, I shrugged my shoulders… When we found out that the hard drive was damaged (both water and electrical) and it was going to cost us the same amount to “recover” everything on there, as the new computer just did, I shrugged my shoulders, too happy to have all my pictures back and satisfied I would not have to start both books over again…

Oh the JOYS of being a parent 😉 First we had a laptop….Then we didn’t… *snap* Just like that…

So our new laptop is great! But my husband went from being “ultra” protective too “super mega, enough already” protective, so much so that he demands the laptop sit on the kitchen table only (despite the purchase of the new wireless router!!) and if carried into the living room MUST be sat atop a TV tray and not on one’s LAP, such as the name indicates… (*note the extreme sarcasm)

Tanya Mossman is an urbanmoms.ca member, mom of four and writer. Please share your comments on her story below.