Miracle Gro and Other Mishaps

I have a very long record of doing very stupid things completely on accident and making myself look like a fool.  Some might say that it's what I do best - and that's okay because I say that too.

One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me growing up is the time I was out in the yard "helping" her garden (you know how preschoolers love to "help" in ways that are almost never even remotely helpful - that was another one of my specialties).  She looked up to find me with a mouth full of Miracle Gro.  For the record, Miracle Gro doesn't actually taste like blue Pixy Stix. At all.  I don't care how much it looks like blue Pixy Stix, it will never ever ever taste like blue Pixy Stix.  I learned that the hard way.  My mom was horrified - partially by the fact that I had just eaten something that might be poisonous and I'm guessing partially by the fact that her child was so stupid she couldn't tell the difference between Miracle Gro and candy.

So my frantic mom called poison control to find out just how dead I was going to be from eating Miracle Gro.  The person from poison control only had one question - "Well, did it work?"  For the record, if any of you work for poison control, you should note that this is NOT the right thing to say to a mother that's frantic and convinced that her child is going to die from stupidity.  But I'm still here, so it didn't kill me.  And no, it didn't work either.

I had another brush with poison control a few years later.  By this time, I think my mom was getting tired of my willingness to eat or drink anything that even remotely resembled food of any nature.

My sister was somewhere on her never-ending quest for the "perfect" hair (whatever that meant).  At this particular moment, it meant that she was trying to lighten her hair.  And her method of choice was to mix water and hydrogen peroxide in a spray bottle and give her hair the occasional spritz.  Me, being the brilliant child I was (and having no doubt suffered the loss of quite a few brain cells in the aforementioned Miracle Gro incident), decided that it would be a fabulous idea to drink from the spray bottle.  To my credit, I thought it was just water in the bottle, though I'm not sure that made the decision to drink from a random spray bottle any less weird.  So I ended up chugging hydrogen peroxide water...because I'm brilliant.  And that was poison control, part two.

You'd think I would learn, but I didn't.  I still don't.  I keep doing the same thing over and over and over hoping that one day something different will happen.  Because it's hard to change.  Rainbows and unicorns will ALWAYS be hard.  For some of us, that's just a fact of life.  It sucks, but it is what it is.  It's not a matter of finding the "right" rainbow or the "right" unicorn.  It's just really hard no matter what.  So I keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes hoping that maybe one day, it really will be blue Pixy Stix.

Maybe it's time for me to stop inhaling Miracle Gro and following it with hydrogen peroxide chasers - I may need those few remaining brain cells one day...