Red is such a pretty color.

 Once again I'm sharing a memoir as my blog. Enjoy.

My husband was a wonderful loving grandfather who adjusted pretty well when our daughter and her two children moved back home after her divorce.  Because she was working and I was working and he was recently retired, he became, by default, Papa Daycare.  As I said he loved these little toddlers (ages three and one) and did a good job of keeping them fed and clean but, since he wasn’t the stay-at- home parent when our children were very young, he had the mistaken impression that when children were in another room being very quiet, everything was fine.

One afternoon, after he had put the children down for their naps, he got busy on his computer.  Time passed, and when I came home from work the first thing that  I noticed was a strangely familiar smell in the air.  Not bad, but I couldn’t quite identify it.  I followed my nose and discovered the three-year-old cheerfully painting designs all over his little sister’s legs with his mother’s bright red nail polish.  His little sister was standing patiently in her baby bed, very close to the railing so he could reach her legs easily.  She was giggling because it tickled.  He had covered both legs quite thoroughly. A fair amount of polish also ended up on the wall paper near the bed.  I think he practiced there first.  Who knew one little bottle of polish could spread so far? 

After a quick check to be sure neither of them had ingested anything, and a wipe down with polish remover and bath for the baby, we set some new guidelines for child care and made sure nail polish was always put away.  I’m happy to say both children survived Papa Daycare and now, as young adults, both are quite artistic.

PS A few years later, some time after my daughter and her kids had moved on to live with her new husband, my husband and I watched the movie Daddy Daycare.  My husband did not think it was funny at all.