Pages

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Band-Aids are Toddler Crack

So about a week and a half ago SchmoopyBoy gave himself a paper cut while flipping through the pages of what is currently his favorite book. A big boy book with real paper pages - one of his first. It was a doozy of a cut. A flap of skin, blood - not pretty. So of course I washed it with soap and water and put a band-aid on it.

Thus was his initiation into the world of band-aid addiction.

Every bump, scratch, owie, or boo-boo must have a band-aid. Must. Have. A. Band-Aid.

And god-forbid you should present him with the wrong band-aid. I mean, really, the addiction is so bad that any plain boring brown band-aid will do. Most of the time. But, boy I tell ya, if he requests Woody and gets Buzz instead... Oh, the calamity.

Every night at bath time, as soon as it gets wet, at least one band-aid loses its stickiness and falls off. The level of catastrophe rivals the end of the world. The End Of The World I Tell You!!!

The child is inconsolable. The crying and carrying on does not even stop once he is out of the tub, dry, with fresh band-aids on every finger. Such is the hell he has just been forced to undergo, losing a precioussss. It takes time to recover from that sort of trauma. A bottle of milk. Lots of cuddles. A couple rounds of Night-Night, Little Pookie.

We are working on overcoming the addiction. On Sunday evening I got him down to two band-aids. Yesterday when I came home from work I saw there was only one. Very impressed I was, that Daddy was able to pull that one off (no pun intended).

What is the power of band-aids? What is their mystical, magical allure? Is there a small amount of addictive chemical embedded in the sticky tape? Should we storm all the drug stores and march on D.C. demanding answers to our probing questions - Why has my toddler morphed into a crazed addict starving for another fix? What is the government hiding about what's in those band-aids, really? Is the band-aid lobby so great that we are powerless to protect our children? Think about the children, for crying out loud, won't somebody think about the children?!!?!?

2 comments:

  1. LMAO! I think all children have been at risk of this horrible addiction. Some are (apparently) effected more strongly than others.

    I find myself wondering if temporary tattoos or even just *stickers* would serve as a good methadone for this addiction.

    ReplyDelete
  2. My son won't put band-aids on any actual injuries (who knows the reasons of a 3-year-old), but he treats them like stickers otherwise. He puts them on my shirt, on my hand, on his father's hand, etc. Loves them. Loves loves them. Sam was saying what a waste it was, and I pointed out that they're pretty much as cheap as stickers, so whatever.

    ReplyDelete