MARK MY WORD: PAPER TOWELS BEST WEAPON IN NIGHTLY SPILL-A-THON

Parents with young children reach for the paper towels before the milk even hits the floor.

Next to diapers, there isn't anything as important in the arsenal of parents as paper towels. You can't live without them.

Without paper towels, your whole house would be just one big ketchup stain. Actually, your whole house would be a montage of soda, fruit juice, ketchup and chocolate milk spots.

As the parents of a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, Joni and I are well aware of just how much we rely on paper towels.

Becca is almost 5. As such, she is already an expert at spilling things. Bailey still has come catching up to do, but she is well on her way. Children's cups come with lids. But they still spill, particularly when Bailey uses them as watering cans, sprinkling Becca's chocolate milk all over the floor.

Childhood is full of thousands of spills. After the first thousand or so, you quit counting.

It's easy to spot parents in the grocery store. They're the ones with a whole truckload of paper towels in their carts.

Many parents don't buy just one roll of paper towels. They buy in bulk. The paper towel companies are nice enough to give us "Family Packs" with eight rolls in a pack. They could make bigger packs, but they're trying to be nice. They don't want to call attention to the fact that America has messy kids.

We keep the paper towel out on the counter in plain sight. We don't try to dress it up like some people do by sticking it on a decorative paper-towel dispenser. Rolls don't last long enough at our house to be part of the decor. We don't care about all those nice sayings and designs that are printed on the towels. We just want the paper towels that will absorb the most awful messes.

Joni arrived home from work the other night just in time to witness a major ketchup spill. Just as Joni walked through the door, Becca dropped a 4-pound plastic bottle of ketchup. The bottle split open and sent the dark, red sauce streaming across our dining room. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a tide of ketchup.

Quickly, I grabbed for the paper towels. Lots of them. At the same time, I tried to keep Bailey from stepping in the condiment.

Four pounds of ketchup is a lot of ketchup. The stuff has a way of oozing everywhere. But fortunately the paper towels were up to the "quicker-picker-upper" task.

With years of practice, we've become quite adept at cleaning up spills. The EPA should study how parents do it. Armed with a few tons of paper towels and some expert parents, the EPA could clean up all those Superfund sites in no time.

The ketchup spill wasn't the worst mess we have experienced. A one-gallon plastic jug of apple juice crashed to our kitchen floor one time. The jug shattered and sent juice everywhere. It gave new meaning to the word sticky. It took miles of paper towels to clean up that mess.

Spills often come in bunches at our house. The night of the ketchup flow, we also endured spilled crackers, mashed bananas and the never-ending chocolate milk drips. A whole bowl of cake mix almost crashed to the floor as Becca was helping Joni make my birthday cake. But Joni's finely-tuned reflexes saved the day. She made a diving catch of the falling bowl that was as pretty as any catch made by an NFL receiver.

All those spills turn parents into well-oiled cleanup machines. Parents with young children get to the point of reaching for the paper towels before the milk even hits the floor. It's an amazing thing to watch.

Some of our enterprising parents need to start a parents' festival, complete with clean-up-that-spill contests. Who knows? Some day it might become an Olympic sport. We're already in training.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.