The Polystyrene Problem

You know how kids love to play with cardboard boxes? Well, Sophia and Thalia decided it would be more fun to play with the styrofoam packing, the kind that easily breaks apart into tiny polystyrene pebbles that spread everywhere and cling statically to everything and takes forever to clean up thoroughly.

When I saw our living room in a state of emergency! Ooooooh! Not cool! Not at all cool!...

Thalia was banished to her playpen because she was attempting to eat the foam pebbles, and Sophia was sent to clean up her bedroom because we didn't want her to see how terribly annoyed we were...

The reason we didn't catch the disaster in time? Laura was doing laundry and I (I kid you not) was very intently reading an Internet news editorial about 100 plus cities in California officially banning polystyrene. (The coincidence did not strike me as funny at the time.)

Later in the evening, after the house had been cleaned, dinner had been served, and good tempers had been restored...

Sophia: Why were you so frustrated?
Laura: Because that was the worst mess I had ever seen in my life!
Sophia: That was the worst? It could have been worser. What if the bookshelf and the table fell down, too, and all the books...
Laura: Okay, Sophia, this is not a competition!...

P.S. I am still finding pieces to clean up two weeks later! Arrrgh!...