Tuesday, July 15, 2008

parenting: competition dress stain remover

Ice Girl is clumsy everywhere but on the ice. I'm not kidding. This is the kid who falls up the stairs, walks into walls, and tumbles out of bed at night.


Last weekend was the Milwaukee Open. We had to leave the house at 5 a.m. on Saturday and at 5:45 a.m. on Sunday.

Saturday night I made blueberry scones for Sunday's in-the-van breakfast. I left them on racks under dishtowels to cool overnight. Sunday morning I boxed them up and put them in the van.


I opened the box of breakfast and...an earwig crawled out. Yuck.


Breakfast Plan B was at a little Greek diner after Ice Girl's 8 a.m. practice ice. It was good and pretty cheap: $5 for Ice Girl's big bagel sandwich with egg, ham, and cheese.


The grease that landed onto Ice Girl's new competition dress came at no extra charge.


I did this freak out thing because I had spent the last weekend sewing the dress and the entire last week beading it.


Ice Coach, calm gal that she is, said that she saw a hardware store on our way to the Kern Center. She knew that they sold this stain remover called Tech there. Her mom uses it and it can get out almost any stain.


We found the hardware store and the small bottle of Tech. Ice Coach blotted the dress using the Tech miracle formula and the stain was gone. I stopped freaking out, too.


Parenting lesson: I put the bottle of Tech stain remover in Ice Girl's bag right away. Now her emergency kit contains band-aids, extra laces, and the stain remover. Next time I think I'll also bring an extra competition dress, too. Duh, Ice Mom!

1 comment:

Jessim said...

Good to hear about Tech! Also glad to hear your coach is calm under pressure- that was a super pretty dress you made.

I'm a bit obsessive about my emergency kit. I've only done 1 show and 1 competition but the bag has extra laces, extra tights, extra skating dress (really), extra bra, extra safety pins, extra hairnet, and a whole ton of hairspray. Not being able to wear bobby pins has really messed with me, because in dance the mantra was always the more pins in the hair the better.

My laces frequently come undone in practices, so if I wear OTB tights, I tape them down for shows and competitions. The rest of my synchro team thinks I'm crazy, but they've come undone before.