I had already wiped down the kitchen cupboards and was putting some muscle into swabbing down the ceiling when my husband came home from work.

“Wow, you’re energetic,” he said, knowing my usual love for housecleaning matched my love for toenail pulling.

I should have just smiled and agreed. But the story was too good to hold back.

“You know how we usually keep the syrup and molasses in the cupboard?” I pointed down to a shelf just above the floor beside the refrigerator.

He nodded, although his eyes were already wandering toward the cookie jar.

“That wasn’t a good idea,” I said.

I had walked into the kitchen to find our youngest, at about 18 months, sitting in a pool of molasses on the floor, happily swirling his hands in the thick black goo.

“That’s not good,” my husband said.

“It gets worse because I didn’t think.”

In one of those sudden rushes that mimic panic – OK, that was panic – I grabbed young son under the armpits and lifted him out of the black goo.

“He didn’t like that,” I explained. “He started kicking in protest.”

“A little kick?” By now, my husband was examining the ceiling and cupboard doors. He knew.

“Not even close to little.”

By the time I wrapped son  in a towel just to stop the kicking, the kitchen was sprayed with molasses.

I’d dunked him in the bathtub, changed my clothes and started scrubbing the sticky kitchen by the time my husband got home.

“Yeah,” he said, pulling out a cookie. “That molasses spot probably wasn’t a good idea.”