I never expected to be chosen as "Mother of the Year", I would have been lucky to make "Mom of the Moment", but there are times I thought I was doing a pretty good job. This event stands out in my mind because I was ironing and ironing was a rare, memorable event. My husband wears uniforms to work and jeans and either T shirts or flannel shirts when he's home, so ironing doesn't come up all that often, but I used to do more of it when I was held captive in my home by young children. I needed to put some freshly ironed clothes on hangers but didn't trust my toddler Tracy in the same room with a wobbly ironing board and hot iron, so I put six year old Will in charge of guarding the iron. His job was to hold the iron handle so it couldn't fall if his freshly warned brother got near the ironing board during the few seconds I was out of the room.
Seconds later I heard Tracy crying. With the disturbing distrust of a toddler, he had deliberately touched his thumb to the iron his brother was holding secure. I was a "nursing" mom, by this I mean that I had medical training as a nurse aide at the hospital, so I sprang into Dr. Mom mode, carried Tracy to the kitchen, ran cool water over his thumb, snipped off a chunk of the aloe vera plant I hadn't got around to killing yet, and squeezed the cooling gel onto his thumb. Congratulating myself on my quick thinking, I took my calmed child into his room for a nap. As I picked up his doctored thumb to kiss his owie Tracy said, "It was the other thumb."
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