Vaseline. #$%&*!? VASELINE.

It's officially the "fourth trimester" and I've been watching vigilantly for signs PPD might be trying to sneak back in. This past week has been especially difficult as Grover went on a five day business trip and now I'm in that weird haze where you've overextended yourself so much you become what is essentially a potato with opposable thumbs.

I haven't really noticed any super hormonal weirdness, just the usual stuff. An overwhelming urge to whack my hair off (thank you, mom and highly skilled cosmetologist SIL, for saving me from myself), exhaustion, and my least favorite side effect - RAGE. Like everything goes red and I have to try really hard not to punch a hole in the wall* type rage.

*except nine eighteen-ish months of no exercise means incredibly weak arms and I'd probably just end up breaking my hand

This morning when I was in the kid's closet trying to extricate a lost baby sock from behind the piles of crap perfectly organized and important things I'm keeping because we'll probably need them someday (normal size broken baby gate, gigantic only slightly broken baby gate, nine pictures I've been meaning to hang for six months, my wedding dress cocooned in a trash bag because I'm totally going to get it preserved ... someday, the humidifier, a fan, five boxes of diapers, decorations from G's birthday party, a step stool I hid behind the wedding dress because the kids were using it to climb shelves, an overflowing hamper ... aaaand I'll stop there because who wants to read a blog post about the entire contents of a closet???), I realized it was the creepy kind of "too quiet" that signals mischief and mayhem. I checked on the sleeping baby and the big kids in the living room and then walked into my bedroom to discover K smearing himself with Vaseline whilst sitting atop my bed, also smeared in Vaseline.

Cue rage.

In 37 seconds (maybe slightly longer because that closet is a time warp), K had turned the bed into a minefield of nasty slippery Vaseline chunks. Do you know how difficult it is to remove Vaseline? It's like what would happen if you microwaved a dead whale and it exploded and blew blubber bits to the moon and back and you only had 10 minutes and half a package of baby wipes to clean it up. No matter how much you clean, there will always be blubber bits you miss.

(I'm thinking maybe that's a bad analogy because the logistics of microwaving an entire whale are highly questionable, but you get the idea.)

Luckily, over the course of 4.5 years of momming I've managed to develop a mechanism that protects my children from my ragey hormonal outbursts (usually) - a sort of delayed reaction device that involves lots of breathing and praying. I calmly cleaned K up, stripped the bed, wiped down the headboard and the nightstand and the wall and the floor and the dresser, headed to the laundry room, and had a total come apart in there, cursing Vaseline in very imaginative wording ... and into a pillow because I've already inadvertently taught G to call people "D-bags". #parentoftheyear

Should I have learned the perils of the substance when T coated G's head in Vaseline a few years ago and it took weeks for her hair to un-grease? Yes. Should I have eradicated all traces of it from my home and never spoken of it again? Absolutely. Unfortunately, you need that shit when you have a tiny baby who poops every ten seconds. So yes, it's my fault for leaving Vaseline within striking distance of K, who can make a mess out of literally anything, but still I'd like to publicly state - EFF YOU, VASELINE. EFF. YOU.

Yes, I do feel better now, thank you.