White Monkey

Friday is Gabe's day to be home with the kids. This Friday started off well, with a pleasant morning walk. After lunches, Gabe put both kids down for a nap. He could hear Navelle rustling around and making noise in her room. No problem; as long as she's in her room and relatively quiet, we leave her there in hopes that she'll eventually fall asleep. But Navelle started banging on the door. Worried that she might need to use the bathroom, Gabe went up to check on her. Much to his surprise, Gabe found that Navelle had taken off her pants and had stuck band-aids all over her butt. A bit shocked, Gabe asked Navelle what she was doing. She replied, twisting at the waist to point at her backside, "I fell and...my butt cracked."  Trying his best to keep a straight face, Gabe told her to knock it off, get back to bed, try to rest, stop messing around, etc.  He closed the bedroom door and went back downstairs. More sounds of messing around. More banging on the door. Gabe decided not to go up this time. What kind of trouble could she get into? Eventually Navelle quieted down. Asleep at last. When Gabe went upstairs later to wake Navelle he opened the door and found quite a surprise. She was peacefully asleep in bed, with no clothes on, and every inch of her body, head to toe, was coated in white Desitin diaper rash cream. It was all over her face, her hands, her arms, her stomach, her legs. She lay there, angelically asleep, her head haloed by tendrils of hair coated in white goo. Only the hollows of her eyes were not white. The Desitin was also on the sheets, the blankets, the pillow, the bed frame, the carpet, the door.  If you know Desitin, you're giving off a low, sympathetic chuckle right now. If you don't know this stuff, think of an oily, white paste made from cod liver oil and titanium dioxide. It stinks. It sticks. It's white. And it doesn't come off easily. Even after a long shower, Navelle's hair and skin still felt tacky and smelled of fish oil. Four loads of laundry and an hour of work on the carpet barely made a dent. "Navelle!" Gabe implored, "why did you do this?"  Very matter-of-fact she explained, "First, I was I was a clear monkey. I wanted to be a white monkey."

Gabe told me this story over the phone while I was at work. "Where is she now?" I asked him. "She's upstairs playing quietly." Uh oh!  He went up to find that she had dragged a stool into the office, reached way back on the desk, grabbed the tape dispenser, and was pulling, arm over arm, all the tape off the roll. She had pieces stuck all over her body including a big snarl on her back. "Look, Dad!" she marveled, running around him in circles to avoid his grab, "I have a tail!"

Later that night, as the washing machine was running her fishy-smell blankets and we were cleaning up from dinner, Navelle went off to use the bathroom. A little time went by. Awfully quiet. I went in to find her systematically pulling tissues out of the box and dropping them into the toilet, mesmerized by the way the water soaked into each sheet.

Ack!  This was one day! Just one day!

Gabe didn't have the time to photograph Navelle as the white monkey. But the photograph of the completely drained tube of Desitin says something of that experience.