Motherhood FAIL of the Week: This Bag is Not a Toy

We specialize in inappropriate toys.  

Before I had the Muffin Man I never understood why every single plastic bag was stamped with, "this bag is not a toy.  Keep out of reach of children".  I couldn't imagine who on Earth would be stupid enough to allow their child to play with a suffocation hazard.  Oh sure, I know there are some pretty dumb people in the world, but everyone knows not to let small children put a bag over their head, right?  Well my friends, now that I am the parent of a very active and curious child, I understand that the message printed on the bag is not there for parents but rather for children, because there is nothing my son would like to play with more than an object with the potential to cause his untimely death.

Lest you are concerned that Noah does not have enough toys to play with and has therefore been driven to find amusement in suffocation hazards, let me assure you that he has so many toys that my living room resembles the clearance section of Buy Buy Baby.  He does not lack for age appropriate, non-lethal toys; if only he actually wanted to play with his millions of toys we would be in business.  Noah's current obsession is the brightly colored plastic bags in which we place his poopy diapers.  Feel free to judge me all you want for filling up landfills with non-biodegradable plastic, but the only reason my house doesn't smell like a dirty diaper is because we immediately bag up all the stinky diapers and rush them out to the trash bin.  Hey, I love the Earth as much as the next girl (probably more, seeing as I'm a dirty hippie) but I refuse to have my house smell like poop; and that shit is potent.

Every single time I put a dirty diaper into one of these plastic bags, Noah attempts to grab it out of my hands.  When I refuse to let him play with the bag, he gets very angry and proceeds to cry and kick his legs and essentially throw a temper tantrum worthy of something out of Super Nanny.  Nothing, and I mean nothing, has the power to distract him from his desire for the crinkly plastic bag holding his poop.  I don't know if it's the cool sound they make, or the bright green color, or just that it's something he's not allowed to have, but the only thing he desires more than uninterrupted playtime with the plastic poop bag of death is my iPhone or an extension cord.  Yesterday morning, after successfully wrestling Noah away from the bag and out of a poppy diaper, I put him on the floor of his room while I sanitized my hands. In the few seconds I had my back turned, the Muffin Man had pulled himself up to standing, grabbed the poop-filled diaper bag, and started chewing on it.  Upon seeing this, I screamed, grabbed the bag out of his hands, and inadvertently knocked him over, causing him to crack his head on the hardwood floor.  I'm not proud of my reaction, but when confronted with the possibility of my child either dying of asphyxiation or being poisoned by his own fecal matter, I freaked out.  Sure, he has a giant bump on the back of his head, but at least I stopped him from eating poop or sucking plastic particles into his lungs.  And maybe, just maybe, he finally got the message that poop bags are not chew toys.  Hey, a woman can dream.