Styro-snow

Have I ever mentioned my dislike of styrofoam? It gives me chills. The sound of two pieces of styrofoam rubbing together is worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. Even lower than that on my list is the sound of a plastic spoon scraping the bottom of a styrofoam cup. SHUDDER. Ear-cringe. Leave the room till it’s over.

Our beautiful new kitchen table was delivered today. It came in a BIG, battered box. And it was well-padded with…you guessed it, STYROFOAM! I’m glad that our table didn’t have a scratch on it, but that white stuff it was swathed in turned our family room into a blizzard. It would’ve been fine if I had been able to quickly dispose of the stuff right away. But I was busy putting the legs on the table and admiring how it looks with the chairs pushed in.

I knew that Jay and Rose were playing with the styrofoam, but when I looked over, they had already crumbled a small pile so I figured I may as well let them play happily for a while before boring-mama came and broke up the party.

As usual, my children surpassed my expectations and created a spectacular snowstorm of styrofoam (say that 5 times fast). Oddly enough, the styrofoam bits weren’t Whiteguys, they were ewoks.  Jay kept saying “I’m making ewoks, Mommy! There are too many to count!” 

Finally I realized that I had to clean up the ewoks before the children started running around the house and scattering the pellets everywhere.

Cleaning up a billion bits of crumbled styrofoam is like trying to sweep up dust on the moon. Here’s what happened:

• I tried brushing it off of the kids’ clothes. But it was too statically charged, so I had to strip them down and whip/shake their clothes out. This spread the chaos even further.
• I had Jay take Rose into their room and close the door so I could deal with the mess without interference.
• SO, I disposed of the box and remaining large pieces of styrofoam.
• Next I tried sweeping up the stuff, but it just blew around and when I finally did get some into the dustpan and tried emptying it into the trash, it floated everywhere but where I wanted it to go:

• Enter: DIRT DEVIL. Why would I have even tried sweeping up the stuff on the carpet at all—why not just vacuum it up in the first place? I had JUST vacuumed the whole house a few hours before this incident, so I was burned out on vacuuming. And my distant days as a Wendy’s employee schooled me in the art of carpet-sweeping with a regular ole broom, so I thought it was possible. Well, sweeping carpet didn’t work well on smooshed french fries then, and it definitely didn’t work well on floaty styrofoam pellets now.
• Thankfully, the Dirt Devil isn’t just for dirt. By the time I finished, the vacuum was full to the brim with white stuff:

• But the front and sides of the vacuum had little white bits static-ed to it so I had to take the hose out and vacuum the vacuum.
• Then I vacuumed up the stuff that fell out of the trash, and finally the place was clean again.

I try to be patient and allow my kids to be messy, but this time I think it may have been better to intervene earlier. One thing that’s for sure: this is probably the last time that I vacuum TWICE in one day!

By the way, here’s what it all looks like now. We still have that box full of all the pictures I haven’t hung yet hiding over there by the bench, and there are no light fixtures in the ceiling yet. I have plans to paint the walls in there a happy yellow and hang some airy curtains up. The only thing that I don’t like about the table is the grooves in it—I like the way they look, but I know it’ll be a pain to scrub sticky stuff out of them. Other than that, I think it’s pretty pretty.