“MOOOOOM,” I hear my 7 year old son yell from his playroom.  “I found one of Emma’s cups!”

“I take it to you,” Emma tells me as she grabs it from her brother.

“Thanks for bringing it down,”  I say to Emma.  “Just DON’T DRINK IT!”

As she rounds the landing on the staircase, I see the sippy cup spout touch her lips.  “NOOOOOO!”  I scream.  She laughs, knowing that she just got the reaction she wanted.

I am immediately horrified.  My children only drink two things – water and milk.  Try as I might to make sure that she keeps all of her sippy cups downstairs, 2 year old Emma is a sneaky little girl who can sometimes get one past me.  We have found them under the playroom sofa, in a toy bin and inside a cabinet.

Finding one of Emma’s old sippy cups is a bit like playing Sippy Cup Russian Roulette.  I could get lucky, like I do most of the time, and find that it’s just water.  Or, I could be a big loser and find that it is filled with curdled milk.  Yep, I’ve been a loser more often than I care to admit.

So, each time we find an old cup, I say a quick prayer over it in hopes that divine intervention can change the outcome.  Dear Lord, Please let this be water and not milk.

Mothers have an unspoken bond over the week old sippy cup.  Some of us hold our breath and close our eyes as we pour the contents down the drain.  Others of us toss the cup in the trash for fear of finding the unknown.  And we all pray that our child didn’t actually drink whatever was in that cup.  It’s a little thing that we don’t talk about much, but it can be horrible….

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