CRISIS MISMANAGEMENT

Site Default - 23 Aug 15

When things go wrong with your children – think scary deep cuts, get-them-to-hospital-quick kind of falls and frightening fevers – do you stay calm or totally panic?

I always thought I was in camp calm. After all, I’ve had to cope with my son’s reflex anoxic seizures (from the age of two months to a year), spent a lot of time in A&E (peas up noses, egg-sized bumps, red-raw eardrums, suspicious-looking rashes, projectile vomit…) and dealt with the drama that comes with raising two run-me-ragged boys.

But the other day I completely lost my cool.

The boys were playing in the garden while I was in the kitchen, checking on them from time to time. Suddenly it all went quiet (never a good sign) so I went out to investigate. Whispering – along the lines of ‘Don’t tell Mummy’ – was coming from the junk-filled garage where they were hiding. When I finally found them – one curled up in a wheelbarrow and the other under a picnic rug, I couldn’t help but scream, ‘What the hell have you done?!’

There was an open can of white ‘oil-based’ paint splattered all over the floor and each of them had it on their faces and hands. My five-year-old (super-sensible) son just had a stripe down the middle of his forehead, but my three-year-old (has-no-fear) son looked like the moon – his whole face was covered in paint and he even had it on his teeth. Fearing that my little one had swallowed some or got it in his eyes (it was on his eyelashes too), I panicked.

All three of us were screeching at the top of our voices with the horror of it all and both boys were in floods of tears, terrified – no thanks to me – that the paint would hurt their skin. Having heard Mummy say the word ‘poisonous’, my eldest was convinced that his brother was in serious trouble and this just made the shrieking worse.

With my other son sprinting behind me, I scooped up my littlest and ran to the downstairs shower in an attempt to scrub off the paint. I used a nail brush, shampoo, face wash…but it wouldn’t budge. Totally drenched from being fully clothed in the shower, I got out and made a panic-stricken phone call to my husband. Luckily that day he was working nearby and said he’d come straight away.

When he arrived, to what he later described as ‘a crime scene’, he managed to calm us all down. He typed in ‘How to get oil-based paint off children’ into his iPhone and then told me that cotton wool and baby oil should do the trick. It did.

Once the paint had all come off and I was sure that nobody had eaten any or damaged their eyes, I stopped being a nervous wreck.

And, despite the ordeal all three of us went through that day, I managed to learn a few things:

1) My husband is amazing.
2) I am actually quite hopeless in a crisis.
3) I need to stock up on Rescue Remedy.
4) Baby oil is incredible stuff.
5) And, most importantly, I love my kids to the moon and back.

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Fiona Pennell lives in the Cotswolds with her husband and their two boys, Jack, 6, and Otto, 4. A former YOU magazine sub-editor, Fiona now spends her days being trampled on, going on slug hunts and dreaming of lie-ins. (Twitter: @fiona_pennell)

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