Hidden treasure

EeeerrrrMyGawd!!!! What is THAT in my clean clothes?

It was at that very moment, if I hadn’t yet come to the realization, this definitely confirmed that, indeed, I really was the mother of a little boy! Here I stood, minding my own business, folding a load of clean, white clothes (which sat atop an existing mound of laundry) and I spotted something! I wasn’t quite sure what it was, but I knew it didn’t belong in a load of white socks, thus it had to be gross.

Think, think…It didn’t look like a hairball the cat urked up which somehow got washed. Could it have been something the dog vomited the night before and was attached to the towel my husband tossed into the dirty laundry basket?

I stood there paralyzed and completely grossed out. I think I even puked in my mouth a little (Listerine, please!). I must have muttered something out loud and my husband swiftly came to investigate. It was stuck to a sock. STUCK. To. A. SOCK! As I started to make my way to the bathroom to toss it into the trash, it seemed to leap off the sock and onto the floor. My husband stood watching my horror as I said, “I don’t know what that is, but it is GROSS!” I hesitated for a moment thinking I should go get some toilet paper to pick it up, and there was my husband, picking it up with his bare hand! I was mortified. How I mustered up the nerve to investigate, I’ll never know. But I took a closer look. “Was it a baby bird?” Ewwww! And I said, “Oh no! How terrible! That’s horrible!” My husband quickly chimed in, “It was probably a lizard.” As if that made it any better.

We’ll never know exactly what it was I found in the laundry that day, but what I do know is little boys are gross. I didn’t need this experience to teach me that fact, however, what that moment taught me is that my son is a normal, curious little boy. The reality is that he likely found this treasure and stuck it in his pocket. Needless to say, I am somehow thankful for whatever it was that found its way into my laundry.