That Ain't Dust, Buster!

The crumbs in my carpet could probably rival, like, the population of Shanghai. Which has somewhere around 23 million people. I swear I could vacuum eight times a day (not like I ever would) and it would still house enough tidbits of cracker, cereal, and miscellaneous crap to feed a small country. That's just what happens when you've got three little kids (although I do have a "no eating on the carpet" rule. Effective, no?).

The latest crumby mess was popcorn. But it wasn't just any popcorn - it was kettle corn. Totally deserving of the big, bold font. If you've never had kettle corn, there's no better season to try it; it's a staple at pretty much any summer fair or festival. It's both sweet and salty, and totally delicious. Anyway, the boys had attacked the last of my bag of kettle corn, and the aftermath was strewn all over the place. I was irritated, because there was a mess to clean up, but also because they had eaten the last of my kettle corn.

Dustbuster in hand, I set about sucking up the popcorn crumbs. But then I came across a big, whole, intact kernel that wouldn't fit into the Dustbuster's narrow opening. So being the lazy resourceful woman that I am, I just ate it (hey, it was my popcorn, on my floor).

Dude. Leftover remnant from the carpet or not, it was sooooo good.

So as I held the Dustbuster in my right hand, poised in midair and running, I hurriedly gathered up the crumbs with my left hand and ushered them into my mouth.

Now would be a good time to mention that due to the recent eye funk (see the last few posts if you're not apprised of the latest), I'm not able to wear contacts for a week. And I don't even own glasses since my last pair broke. So that means with no corrective vision, I'm kinda blind. Or at the very least, annoyingly fuzzy.*

*I meant my eyesight, not my legs and pits, but those happen to be annoyingly fuzzy too.

With that little tidbit of info, we'll get back to the story.

I had cleaned up (with, um, my mouth) the remainder of the kettle corn crumbs, so I was on my way back to the kitchen with the Dustbuster when I spotted another piece of popcorn on the top of the bookshelf. This isn't unusual, as my kids think it's mandatory to walk around with their snacks rather than sit in one place and eat them the way they're supposed to. This particular piece of kettle corn was big - not a shoddy little crumb, but an entire beautiful popped kernel. So I greedily snatched it up and shoved it into my mouth.

But y'all? It wasn't kettle corn.

It was a chewed-up-and-dried piece of toilet paper.

Cameron, my paper-eating three-year-old, has this habit of chewing a wad of toilet paper like it's gum. Then after a while, he'll either swallow it or spit it out somewhere. And apparently, this time he had spit it out onto the bookshelf - where it went unnoticed until I thought it was a piece of popcorn and tried to eat it.

Eating popcorn off the floor may be gross, but eating dried-up spit-laden toilet paper is a level of gross that even I can't handle.