Share the biggest messes your children have made in the 5 minutes when your back was turned - £300 voucher to be won!

[EllieMumsnet]

Perhaps you have a child with the potential to be a future 'Banksy' - an artist able to cover a wall in felt-tip graffiti, while you are busy chopping carrot sticks. Or maybe they're more of a Jackson Pollock character - suddenly spraying the entire contents of their bowl across the floor in homage to the painter's splatter artworks? We’ve all been there when unbelievable messes have occurred in the blink of an eye and Carex would love to hear your stories about the biggest messes your children have made.

Here’s what Carex has to say: “Here at Carex we’re all about living life hands on… and sometimes that means getting messy! Luckily we’re here to clean, care and protect with our range of antibacterial hand washes. To keep the family busy this summer you can currently enjoy half price entry to Alton Towers and Sea Life centres with every promotional pack of Carex.”

Did you leave the room for five short minutes only to come back and find they'd somehow got at your prized Chanel lipstick and had liberally applied it not only to their lips, but their cheeks, eyes, hands and hair? What madness made you leave them unsupervised?! Share the unfortunate stories of the times you turned your back and a mess ensued.

Everyone who posts on the thread will be entered into a prize draw to win a £300 voucher of their choice (from a list).

Thanks and good luck
MNHQ

Standard Insight T&Cs apply

My kids have not been too bad, except once my son was looking for a favourite t shirt, so he emptied every drawer in his room unitl he found it. I then confiscated every remote control until order was returned. I returned one control for each part tidied up

My lipstick all over her face, her clothes, all over my bed, all over the walls who knew a lipstick could go so far and why doesn’t it stay on my lips but its stuck hard on every other surface.

My favourite with my daughter was when I heard her come up and go into the bathroom and turn on the tap. She was only 2 at the time so I went to see what was going on and she immediately hid her arms behind her back....I sternly asked what had happened and she sheepishly pulled out her arms covered in felt pen!! Every colour imaginable scribbled all over them...she'd obviously had a great time then panicked and sneaked upstairs to hide the evidence!

When we moved house in our infinite wisdom we decided to use silk paint so that it would wipe clean as our youngest was 2. The walls underneath are not great so while i wasn't looking she found a small piece to lift, this has now become a regular occurrence and we have two large white patches in different places in the living room. I am now refusing to redecorate until she moves out!

sudocrem everywhere!!

Picasso like crayon images drawn all over DDs dolls, teddies and bedroom walls

Drew on the cream sofas that weren't very old, it took a lot of scrubbing to get it off.

A few years back ours thew a pile of hire car documents on the floor, spread them around and then played 'stepping stones' on them.
They had that carbon copy paper in them and it left blue ink prints on the carpets in the dinning room, living room and hall way.
All carpets ruined, in under 10 minutes.

When my eldest daughter was 4 and my baby was 3, I put the 2 of them up to bed. They shared a room at the time. I had barely got back downstairs when they were roaring and chaos broke out. I ran to see what was wrong and was met by my 4 year old covered in blood.
They were both very honest about what happened; my 4 old felt tired and was too lazy to pick her own nose so she asked her little sister to pick it for her. And she did very kindly but in the process went a bit too high with a sharp nail. They are not allowed pick each others noses from then on.

The 4 year old who was too lazy to pick her own nose decided on late evening before she made her first holy communion to give herself a new look. I had her bathed just before bedtime, mass was on too early in the morning to do it. Rollers in her hair, nails painted, she looked like a doll. Then she went to her room and with a black sharpie marker drew a curly moustache, beard and unibrow on her face. Walked into the kitchen to me and said "hello, how do you do? My name is chef le bon bon".

Chef le bon bon was sitting out in our front garden. She was picking daisies , so i thought. She ran in and got a large lunchbox and back out to the garden. I could see her putting daisies in box so i assumed she was going to make a daisy chain, and i was smiling cos she never does things like that. She came in with the box and went to her room. After a few mins and a lot of noise from her room i went to see her daisy chain. But as i went in the room i saw all her art stuff was thrown all over the floor. She has a timber blanket box where all art bits go. She was frantic searching and when i asked what was wrong she said spitty, sputty and several other weird names were gone missing. She had been gathering spitbugsand other insects and made a home for them in her artbox. The daisies and grass was their playground and they were escaping through the cracks on sides of box by the second.

Chef le bon bon has recently just before summer holidays started collecting beer bottle caps. Yes i know how that sounds😩 i dont drink alcohol at all ever, my husband does but never at home. She has somehow got it into her head that they are worth money and she will be a millionaire from them. I have tried to tell her otherwise. When we go to local hotel for food every so often, she asks for them. They found her hobby interesting so gave her cuploads each time.My house is full of them so i told her no more, she leaves them everywhere and then when people come in to house its a bit awkward trying to explain it😂 so when i banned any more bottle caps she started to sneakily collect them from the park when we go on the way back from school. Thankfully one morning as she was heading out the door for school i heard funny noise in her bag when she accidentally hid it off door. I took her bag and opened it and nearly fainted. She had her bag filled with bottle caps. So all had to be dumped on floor. Then she went off in a huff because i ruined her chance of being a millionaire. Im still finding some here and there from a few weeks ago.

DS1 re-potted a fern plant... in the toilet. Then he flushed the toilet.

Unfortunately the toilet was blocked at the time because he’d just re-potted my lovely fern in it.

Even now, years later, I could weep. Soil up the walls, a muddy flood creeping its way out of the bathroom along the hallway. Luckily the hall carpet slowed it down a bit

DS2 wasn’t a blameless toddler either. He got up during the night a few days before Christmas and crept downstairs and opened all the presents we’d received so far from family and friends that were under the tree.
He pulled all the cushions off of the furniture and pulled all the books and videos off the shelves.
Then he headed into the kitchen and emptied all the bottom cupboards and the contents of the drawers on to the floor. Finishing by tipping a big box of washing powder over everything and going back to bed.

When I got up I thought we’d been burgled! I was frozen in shock. I just stood shaking and thinking that someone had been down here while we slept stealing our things.
But nothing obvious was gone. Tv, video and hi-fi (This was the ‘90s) were all still there.

Took hours to clean the washing powder off of the contents in the kitchen and re-wrap the presents. It was awful.

Only food mess really springs to mind - bowls of cereal everywhere for example.

Felt pen all over their arms, bellies and faces. I’d only gone for a wee!

Biggest mess was actually when they stayed over with my DSis, which made me both glad it wasn't at home and mortified that it had happened there! Made worse by her being a real neat freak at the time!

They woke up before her and oldest decided to make breakfast so DSis could sleep in. Oldest was 5 and currently going through a phase of pancakes for breakfast every day. They had made cakes the day before so she knew where to find the eggs and only dropped one, but when she got the flour out it was too heavy for her as it was nearly a full bag and it dropped to the floor and covered the kitchen in a cloud of flour

The noise woke my DSis and by the time she got downstairs my DD was helpfully clearing up, using lots of water and a teatowel, which was just making a paste on the floor! My DSis said she didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and was still half asleep when confronted with it. Amazingly she just got DDs washed and dressed and they went out for breakfast and then she dropped them off at home before going to clean up. I didn't know about it until DD was telling me all about her sleepover, I called DSis and found out the full details and offered to come clean up but she said it was sorted.

I was actually really surprised and impressed with how she dealt with it, and she seemed calmer about mess after that which was good as I now have nieces and nephews!

Pen all over the walls on the stairs. Oddly as soon as my daughter could write her name she'd scribble it everywhere so although the mess was really bad it was easy to identify the culprit.
Something else that displayed my daughter's artwork once was her brother's face. They'd had a "sleepover" in one of their bedrooms. She'd woken up first and drawn glasses and a moustache on him with a black felt pen. She was about 6. It was one of those moments when you know you should be very cross but you can't stop laughing. He wasn't impressed though (he was about 5) and it took ages to get off.

My youngest decided to play with the coals in the gas fire and then open every cupboard in the kitchen looking for her pens - my cupboards are white gloss and they were covered in black finger marks!!

I went in the house for a couple of minutes and left my 18 month old playing in the garden. I came back to find the patio covered in gravel

My two children were playing with several toys in their bedroom and when I popped in to check on them, I casually remarked "Goodness, I wonder if you can get anything else on the floor!" They clearly saw this as a challenge... When I checked back another twenty minutes later they had emptied every cupboard, wardrobe and drawer in every bedroom onto the floor. Took a LOT longer to clear up than to create!

I was plating up dinner, when I came back my daughter and her cousin had coloured each other's faces in with felt tips. Took a good couple of days till tgey looked less rainbow like!

Spilling tea on the carpet!

My little ones emptied all the flour all over the kitchen floor because they wanted to make cupcakes, spilt the whole Bottke of juice all over the floor because they wanted juice, emptied all the frozen food all over the floor & decided to get creative with their felt tips on the walls all in the space 5 mins, but I do have 3 under 5's.

I left 2 yo dd alone for about 30 seconds with a bottle of sun cream. The stuff that goes on green and then changes.
She covered herself, the sofa, the carpet and her favourite soft toy in it because ‘hot mummy’.
We still have a green patch on the carpet and poor Flopsy rabbit hasn’t been the same since.

There has been so many! I learnt early on to make sure and never turn my back whenever spaghetti sauce was involved otherwise it would end up on the wall, clothes, the couch anywhere you could think of.
I remember turning my back on my youngest in the supermarket once and the next thing I knew the whole shelf was on the aisle floor. The manager was not happy.