Ludicrous Mama is back after her big win at our Anniversary Giveaway last week. Maybe she’s feeling guilty about beating everyone else out of such a cool necklace, because she’s adding yet another story to her World’s Worst Moms collection. You can find more of her antics at her blog, Biting the Hand that Feeds You.
So. We’ve had an overbooked a very busy summer. And while my 3-year-old has mostly phased out of naps, she does tend to fall asleep if we’re driving anywhere after 3 p.m. So I often tried to “force-nap” her in between events, so she’d fall asleep earlier rather than later. Well. One day she just wasn’t with the program, so I had an hour to kill before her evening dance class. My plan had been for her to fall asleep on the 30-minute drive there, and then sit in the car and read my book until class time. No dice. So since we were already there, I decided to bribe her into shutting up about wanting to go home kill some time by getting a bubble tea. I knew that there was a bubble tea place around the building behind her dance place. So we trekked around the side of the building.
Along the way, there were little plants with what looked to be orange-y raspberries. Mommy Someone stupidly said, “Oooh raspberries!” before realizing that these weren’t on canes, like the ones we have in our garden at home, but on weird ground cover plants. So I tried distracting her with a centipede crawling by. Which worked, for about 2.5 seconds. Then it went under a leaf, and I started looking for it again.
Meanwhile, the Oompa-Loompa was busy stuffing her gob with illicit berries.
To my credit, the second I realized she was eating them, I yanked her up and took her away from the plants. But then I made a decision that, in hindsight, probably wasn’t the wisest. At 20-weeks pregnant, I ate some to see if they tasted poisonous. Yeah. Because I’m totally an expert on poisonous mystery berries. And it’s not like the fetus would suffer, right? /facepalm
Then, to compound my clearly brilliant decision, I decided to wait and see if we got any side effects. Later, my husband pointed out that I could have gone to one of the shops (or our class place) and asked for the number to the property management office to see if I could find out more about the plants. But at the time, I figured, hey, they wouldn’t plant poisonous berries here where people could reach them, right? (It was in a clearly landscaped area.) So off we went to get our bubble tea.
And then. . . I totally forgot the whole thing. Yup. Pregnancy-Brain at it’s finest. When I mentioned it to my husband (days later,) he was all rushing to look them up and stuff, as if it were urgent, so I had to tell him it had happened earlier. He was the one who pointed out that maybe trying out potentially poisonous food was not a good idea while pregnant. . . I hadn’t even thought about it!
The neighbors happen to have a plant just like it, so we found out that it’s actually a ground raspberry that is safe to eat. Whew!
But the worst part? My biggest regret was that we couldn’t harvest more. There were loads of ripe berries! And they probably weren’t poisonous.
Tammy Soong is a writer, wife, and mom from Reno, Nevada. She takes an absurd amount of pain medication, but not enough to have actually named her children "Newt" and "Elfie." She spends most days stressing out over clutter, writing stuff for this place, and working on podcasts with her gal pals, the Blogging Betties.
Did you go to harvest them at the next dance class? I so would have! That is aaaan awesome story!
Laughing hard. I've so been there. As happy as I am that my kids are huge fruit and veggie eaters, I almost killed myself the day I caught my one-year-old eating strange berries off a plant at the back of a friends' yard. I raced over to him, swept his mouth out (gagging him and making him sob in the process), THEN looked at the tree he had snatched the fruit from. It was a mulberry tree. I tortured him for nothing.
The big difference between our stories is that I DID proceed to borrow Tupperware from my friend so I could take a couple pounds of ripe mulberries home with us. Yum.
My recent post Dress Up
Ah, pregnancy brain! I once took the dog's medicine instead of my own when I was pregnant with the twins. Luckily, it was all antibiotics and it was fine (heck, it probably would have been cheaper to just take the dog's!). Anyway, the lady on the phone from Poison Control had a hard time not laughing!
I don't think I've ever really gotten over pregnancy brain.
Yeah… I "joke" [not convinced that it isn't true though] that she sucked all my IQs out through the nips, since my brain has felt like moldy Swiss cheese since she was born (not QUITE as bad as when I was pregnant though… One time I re-heated a slice of pizza in the stove just before hubby came home. When he got home, he saw that the stove was on, and asked what was cooking. And AS I WAS MUNCHING MY FRESHLY HEATED PIZZA, I started panicking that it had been on since dinner the night before.)
My recent post Project Lunch: Eating Healthy, EasyLunchBox-Style!