Note: It's usually a good idea to supervise your kids

We should have remembered this helpful tidbit tonight while making dinner. But Ben was too busy grilling 3 kinds of fish (we could not make up or minds), and I was too busy washing strawberries so perfect they must be genetically modified and cooking corn and 2 kinds of green veggies (again, indecisiveness) to really watch Harry or Jack. Ben ran upstairs a few times to grab a platter and some utensils with which to prod and turn the fish, and he said hi to the boys, who were busy destroying the living room. I interacted with them anytime they were directly underfoot, playing with the childproof caps on the stove, or reaching on their tippy toes for pot handles, but other than that I stuck my head over the counter a few times to tell them to play nice and share. That was the extent of our supervision.

Still, everything seemed fine. Pleasant even.

Just as I was putting lovely bowls of brilliantly colored produce on the table and Ben was rounding the corner with a plate piled high with salmon, halibut, and tuna, both of us noticed a wet, white, sort of glittery substance all over the floor. Harry told us it was the rug, and in his defense, it did sort of look like our shaggy white rug. But it was so WET, which worried us because we assumed that one or both of them ate it, and we didn't know what it was.

We sat them in their chairs, but neither of them ate very much (as is their custom when something other than total crap is on the menu), and Jack was sort of coughing a little, so of course (because we are, as is well documented here) so good under pressure, we FREAKED OUT and assumed that they were in mortal danger.

Ben tasted the stuff, and so did I, but we couldn't place it. We checked Harry's chair, the sofa pillows, all the toys, under the rug, in the trash cans, in the hall closets-- no sign of anything wet and white with chunks of glittery gel crystals.

The urgent care nurse told us to go to the ER, and she called ahead to the children's hospital ER to tell them we were coming, a detail that of course made us freak out and act even more ridiculous. Harry, for example, left the house with his shoes on the wrong feet. Jack was barefoot.

In the car, we called poison control, and the lovely woman on the phone told us it sounded like a diaper or one of those "do not eat" packets in purses and shoe boxes, both nontoxic choking hazards. She advised us NOT to go to the hospital, telling us to give Jack some water and something soft to eat to make sure he didn't have an obstruction. We weren't convinced and kept driving toward the hospital, especially after the urgent care nurse called back to say that if Jack started choking, we should pull over and call 911.

About 2 miles from our destination, I whipped a spare Pull Up out of my bag, doused it with water, and then Ben and I pried up the outer layer and pulled out some of the diaper's wet insides-- white, damp, full of glittery chunks of gel crystals. Yes! Jack may or may not have eaten a wet diaper from the bathroom trash (we know he strew it about the room-- we don't actually know if he swallowed it)! Which means, yes, Ben and I both tasted wet diaper from the bathroom trash. Neat.

Instead of the ER, we went to Dairy Queen (what? the nurse said he should eat something soft-- hello, soft serve?), where Jack was about to happily devour a chocolate shake when Harry piped up from the corner where he was perusing the book of ice cream cake decorations, "I peed my leg, Mama." We looked up to find him standing in a dripping puddle. Ben wiped him and the floor up with a stack of napkins, and we grabbed Harry's blizzard and Jack's shake and walked to the car as fast as we could . Harry, with his Crocs full of urine and on the wrong feet, slowed us down a bit and made an awkward splishy sound with each shuffle.