Beware the Third Baby

The other day I was showering after my workout and The Fifth Element was in the bathroom with me.  She loves to be in the vanity part of the room while I’m in the shower.  It’s where she can do the most damage to the carpet, closet and let loose the faucets on the tub (YEAH! Let’s soak the clean laundry Mommy just chucked in there and didn’t have time to hang!) and I can’t catch her as quickly.  She goes back and forth between the shower and the sinks, babbling her two year-old slang and hurling elastics, brushes, self-tanners and make-up brushes around the room with wild abandon.  In the shower said ‘hello’ to her as she walked into my part of the bathroom.  I thought it was cute when she climbed on the scale too.  The scale she then moved under the light switch which boosted her up to turn off the bathroom light and quickly exit the room, slamming the door and leaving me alone. In the dark.  In the shower with tons of shampoo in my eyes.

What the hell?

I go back to rinsing my hair and then realize, “OH NO! No, no, no, no, NO!”

I burst out of the shower, rip open the door and lean out into the rest of the bathroom.  Headbands are strewn across the floor.  An entire lipstick has been rubbed on her legs and what appears to be eye gel is in a thick, gloppy coating too.  The jar of costly Ole Henricksen gel still in one hand while the other clutches a stubby eye pencil.  Dry shampoo powder hangs in the air like a cloud and piles of it sit on the floor.

Seconds.  That’s all it took for her to wield her superfast, stealth moves and rip through our bathroom.  Mere seconds.

I always say that the third baby is a game-changer.  Adding a third child is not just more work or another mouth to feed.  Before The Fifth Element aka ‘Third Baby’ came along we called The Comedian the “WMD”.  She could run through a room and in a matter of minutes destroy it and overturn furniture.  Mass destruction, oh indeed.  But the Third Baby’s are in a class all their own. The third child is more like a top-secret government science project that has gone awry and broken free from the lab.  They are built stronger, smarter and with more speed than you knew was possible.  Third babies make you look back in a halcyon-induced daze to “simpler time” when your home was quiet, locks were picked in minutes versus milliseconds, walls were not scaled like spiderman and bathroom stools were not repurposed into weapons or to climb pantry shelves, gain access to glasses, top boxes in the closet or the elusive paint jars hiding in the basement.  Take what you thought about your second child and just maximize it all ten-fold.  Throw in a super loud voice to be heard above the other two, the ability to put adults in choke holds at the age of 1 1/2 and you have a third baby.

All you can do in these situations is stock up on the booze, hope that Netflix keeps streaming and hide the power tools in someone else’s home.