Soap Eating: A Family Tradition

I heard Eliza gagging in the bathroom the other morning. I walked in to find she had been eating Bath & Body Works handsoap. Delicious. When she rinsed her mouth out with water she spit bubbles. It was great.

And everywhere.


If you enlarge this picture, you'll see a bubble coming out of her mouth.

I'm guessing the reason she ate the soap was because it smelled yummy. I know how that goes.

When I was about 10 (is that right mom?) I spent the night at a friend's house. She wasn't a close friend, but one of my mom's piano students who was a year younger than I was. She was having a slumber party. It was my first introduction to prank phone calls. We'd call up someone and say "Hi. Is there a Jon there?" and when they would reply "no" then we'd move to the clever punchline: "Then where do you go to the bathroom?" We knew we were hilarious.

Sometime during the party, I made my way to the beautifully decorated bathroom, where I found a cute dish filled with dime-sized red and white star-shaped soaps that smelled like cinnamon. I'm pretty sure I thought they were candy because I ate them like they were. They tasted a little "spicy" and burned my mouth a little, but that didn't surprise me because I had eaten my mom's cinnamon candy before and sometimes had to take it out of my mouth when it got too strong. I munched on those soaps all night long. I would rearrange the stars on the dish so my friend's mom wouldn't notice that so many were gone. Unfortunately my secret was up when I threw up everywhere the next morning.

I hope Eliza learned her lesson sooner than I did!