Once in a (great) while, she is motivated to put her clothes away and make her bed, but more often than not I am left to question why she has dressers in her room and if I can convert her closet into another bathroom.
To be fair, she is a busy body. She is either at school, cheer practice or a game, or the horse barn. And I wasn’t particularly tidy as a teen girl, either, so I try to give her some grace.
My pet peeve though is food in her room — any room other than the kitchen or dining room, really. It’s no secret we have animals in the house, but we definitely don’t want to invite unwanted rodents into the house.
On a recent family trip, our daughter visited the Hershey Store. The variety of Hershey Kisses available was the ultimate temptation. We came home with a sampling of sweet chocolates, but they did not make it from our daughter’s travel bag to the kitchen cabinet.
The kisses were discovered in her room by an animal. Not a rodent, thankfully, but our nosy, scent-following labrador retriever. (Before you panic, he is fine.)
“MMMMOOOMMMMM!” our daughter hollered in a panic while holding up the mutilated bag once containing Hershey Kisses.
I stared in disbelief and looked from our 20-pound mutt sleeping beside me, to our super-sized yellow lab who looked (and smelled) to have a stomach ache.
“Dogs can’t have chocolate!” our daughter howled with tears forming in her eyes.
It’s true. Chocolate is toxic to dogs, especially in large quantities.
And if you read this column last week, you now know why I had to order a new living room rug on Amazon. Told you it deserved its own write-up, but I’ll spare you the yucky details.
“Was it in your room?” I ask her.
She glared at me, again stating that the real issue was the dog eating chocolate.
“THIS is why you can’t leave food in your room!” I said (probably yelled) while bracing myself for another vet bill.
After some calls, research and monitoring (and clean-up), the dog ended up being just fine. Had it been the smaller dog that had given in to the chocolate temptation, I would likely be writing a sad story.
The good news, aside from the dog’s full recovery? There is no more food in our daughter’s room. The bad news? Her closet cannot be converted into another bathroom.
Motherhood, Part II, is a recurring column in the Springfield News-Sun.
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