As stated…and stated…and stated: I have three girls.  Yes, we have a lot of dresses.  Yes, we have a lot of tears.  Yes, we have very busy social calendars.  Normally, I don’t mind the busy social calendars too much.  I enjoy conversing with all of you cute mommies while doing the Pick-up-from-the-Party Polka, and as my daughters get older, I’ve discovered one of the best ways to learn about what is truly going on at school is to offer to load up thee carpool, and then shut up thee mouth.  Secrets previously untold will fly forth from the backseat, and you will suddenly be in the know and prepared to either initiate appropriate conversations or react thoughtfully to tough tween questions.

What I do not like about the Super Social Shuffle are the goody bags.  I know.  Now you think I’m a party-pooper.  It’s just that most of the time, what finds its way home from the party and into my house is candy the girls don’t need, and little trinkets my girls hoard until we are almost buried alive in superballs, cootie catchers and plastic moustaches.  I try to edit the bags as much as possible, but I confess, I usually get caught (hence the statement above about “lots of tears”).

Recently, what came home in said goody bag was a yellow glow stick.  Sounds harmless, right?  Maybe even a little helpful when playing an evening game of hide and seek or when trick-or-treating.  Yeah…nope.  This glow stick, much to my daughter’s surprise, broke when she snapped it, and the yellow goo exploded everywhere – including all over her face and into her eyes.

What ensued is enough drama to make a Shakespeare play look “tame” (get it?)…

My now yellow daughter was screaming that she had been rendered blind – the kind of gut-wrenching, blood-curdling, dear-god-maybe-she’s-right kind of screams.  And then my littlest one, never to be outdone in the drama department, pushed the accelerator to the floor.  Running through the house, stopping only to stare at her banana-esque sib, she began screaming even louder than her sis, and the chant went something like this: “You’re yellow!  She’s yellow!  She is always going to be yellow!  Her cheeks are yellow!  Her eyes are yellow!  Her lips are yellow!  Everywhere yellow, yellow, yellow!”  As I’m sure you can imagine, Big Sis didn’t find this reaction particularly reassuring.

Folks, we all have our finer parenting moments, and our not-so-finer parenting moments, and I confess, how I got this situation under control definitely falls into the latter category for me.  The bad news is that I think I stooped so low as to tell my youngest daughter she was beginning to turn purple (from all of the yelling, of course) and I instructed her to go look in the mirror.  The good news is that I am now the possessor of sage medical advice for broken-yellow-glow-stick-syndrome.

The answer…

A warm shower for the skin, warm water in the eyes.

And the moral of this story…

Have boys.*

*Just kidding, angels.  I love you, yellow and all.