All that glitters.

Cooper's at the age where he is getting into EVERYTHING, in a totally sneaky, I know I'm not supposed to touch this so I'll just hide over here and do it and you can't see me can you?  kind of way.

Some prime examples include doing SOMETHING to our cable that required a service visit (and believe me, if it has to do with wires and R can't fix it himself, it's bad.  Really bad.) and unplugging the fish tank filter, which resulted in the ultimate demise of Sunshine, our yellowest fish.

But I still have delusions that my boy, my baby, wouldn't do anything wrong - not on purpose anyway - so when he walked up to me quite nonchalantly the other day and I noticed he was sparkling from head to toe, my mind immediately went to the most reasonable explanation.

"OH MY GOD HE'S A VAMPIRE!  HE'S BEEN BITTEN BY ONE OF THOSE SPARKLY VAMPIRES!OH NO!  I HATE SPARKLY VAMPIRES! WHY COULDN'T IT BE ONE OF THE GOOD VAMPIRES, LIKE FROM TRUE BLOOD?AT LEAST THOSE VAMPIRES AREN'T ALL WEIRD AND EMO AND STUFF!?!?  ZACHARY!  ZACHARY, I NEED YOU!  BRING THE STAKE AND THE GARLIC!  WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO KILL YOUR BROTHER!!  HURRY UP, HONEY!  IT'S BAD!  HE'S SPARKLY!"

Zachary, ever the voice of reason, or at least sanity, said "Ewww!  He's all covered in GLITTER!  And it's SQUISHY!"

"No, it's NOT glitter," I argued with my seven year old, who was completely correct.  "I never buy glitter.  I'm anti-glitter.  There is no glitter in this HOUSE!!!  Clearly, he is a vampire.  Where's that cross I had?  We used it just last week for that demon thing." 

"Well, there's glitter all over Cooper, so I guess there IS some in the house," Zachary said, again totally reasonable with his assessment.  "Plus, the floor is all shiny and squishy, too."

Cooper, meanwhile, continued to try to look innocent while simultaneously licking the glitter off his fingers.  Don't you look so innocent.  I've got your number, your little Edward Cullen wannabe.

Ok, fine.  I checked Cooper a little closer, risking life and limb (hey, everybody knows baby vampires are the hungriest and therefore the most likely to bite), and I determined he was indeed covered in squishy glitter.  Green squishy glitter.  You know, the kind that comes in those glittery squishy toy balls that I would never in a million years buy but my sister brings into my house by the truckload?  Yeah, those.  

Ok, no big deal.  I'll just throw the kid in the shower, vacuum up the glitter, and that will be that.

Oh wow.  Not so much.  

I washed the kid.  I vacuumed the floor.  Then I re-washed the kid and re-vacuumed the floor.  But every time the light shifted a certain way or the other, I would catch sight of some more, mocking me with its sparkling loveliness as it winked at me merrily from the depths of my carpet, my kid's ear...

And since what I like to refer to as the Near-Staking Incident of 2013, I have continued to find large patches of this infernal glitter in places I would have never imagined.  It's all over my kitchen, although to my knowledge Cooper was never near that room with the now defunct glitter ball.  It's in the bathroom, glimmering up at me from the deep, dark depths around my toilet, a place I typically do not dare to look.

It's mocks me shinily from in between the floorboards of my hardwood floors.  It winks merrily at me from my couch cushions.  One particularly insistent piece is so deeply embedded into my left eye I believe it's permanent.

My house is glittery, and it's here to stay.

I think a vampire really would have been easier to get rid of.

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