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A day you have to contact the state poison controll center is NOT a good day!

Two nights ago I went with my sister to a lecture at the university. We were gone around five hours and I expected my husband to watch my five children, and to a lesser extent, my oldest three to help watch the younger two.

I got home kind of late and noticed things were very, very messy. Usually expected when my husband is the only one with the kids. He doesn't believe in prevention when it comes to home maintenance.

However the NEXT day (yesterday) I noticed that strange things were in my toilet room. (In case you don't know, my toilet room is literally a room with a toilet in it. There is also a large closet that I use to keep all my girly ammo in-shampoo, facial cleansers, medicines, perfume, lotion, etc, etc, etc). Among these strange things were Teddy's trumpet case, the plastic tub I let the kids keep the legos in, and the Star's Illini seat. I didn't think too much about all this weird stuff in my toilet room but something in my subconscious told me something wasn't right. I couldn't figure out what it was so I ignored it.

Last night my kids asked for their vitamins but I was having a bad day so I told them they could just have them in the morning. I have a chewable "flinstones" type vitamin for the older kids and some "gummy" multi-vitamins for my littlest Bossman because he's still a little too young for "big kid" vits. However this morning we all got up late (again ~ I HAVE to find out why my alarm is going off so quietly! It's driving me nuts!) so they didn't get them.

Skip to this afternoon when Bossman asked me for his gummy vitamins. I headed towards my bathroom and he said "wait! I know where they are!" darted ahead of me and reached behind the toilet on the floor and pulled out the open container of gummy vitamins.

I gasped very loudly and snatched the container from him. I screeched "HOW MANY DID YOU EAT?!?" which was probably a dumb question because the only time he could have eaten any was two nights ago and he wouldn't remember. I of course, immediately panicked. I keep all the kid vitamins (the ones that taste good) up on the very top shelf of my closet. The REASON I kept them up that high was because I had heard all the horror stories of kids eating too many vitamins and having seizures, dying, etc, INCLUDING my best friend, who remembered when she was younger her little sister eating a bunch of flinestones vitamins and having to go to the emergency room to get her stomach pumped.

I called that best friend who suggested I call poison control. I've had to call them once before when my daughter drank some dye out of a science kit used to see things better under a microscope. They told me if the dye was blue I needed to call 911 IMMEDIATELY and if it was red just to watch her carefully for the next few weeks. Luckily, it was red.

Still, I did not want to call such an important number if it wasn't urgent, and I was still assuming he ate all the vitamins two nights ago - if there was going to be a SERIOUS problem it would have manifested by now (I thought). I looked carefully at the container. It still looked about the same as it did the last time I gave them vitamins - in my uneducated opinion it looked like he ate between 5 and 10 at the max (he says he ate two and two - but the label says never give more than two in the first place). I tried to look it up online but everything said the same thing.

Call poison control.

So I did.

Keep in mind at this point I was a wreck, but the nice lady said to look at the ingredients and see if iron and calcium were listed. They were not. So she said he'd be fine and if he was going to have a bad reaction it would have happened by now.

WHEW! I was so scared!

Now that I know my baby boy is not going to need to be hospitalized a couple things are really bothering me.

#1 this child can open child-proof caps.

#2 I took a closer look at those things in my toilet room. The box with my hair stuff in it he obviously got from the closet. The Illini chair and the grey box he obviously got from downstairs. The trumpet case, however (the trumpet we are BORROWING from the school and WE DO NOT OWN) had to have come from the living room. This means that this four year-old child picked up this trumpet case and carried it past all three older kids (no doubt staring at that idiot box people call a television) and then took it RIGHT PAST The Mr.!

THEN he had to have disappeared into my toilet room for at LEAST ten minutes stacking up all these things to make himself a ladder of sorts to climb up and get those gummy vitamins from the very top shelf of my closet.

What if he had fallen? He could have been seriously hurt! WHY did no one notice him taking things into my room? WHY did no one check on him?

NOW I have to have a SERIOUS talk with some people in this house. Luckily God watches my kids because sometimes I swear I'm the only person who does!!