On Saturday, Diane and Matt and their lovely daughters came over to play. Unlike our last play date (the one I cried all the way home from after Chipmunk spent the last five minutes of it shrieking and running away from me and stopping only long enough to cackle disdainfully) this one went super well.
Until he took off his clothes and climbed into the empty bathtub in the bathroom where Matt was cleaning off his older daughter’s feet in the sink and he peed on Matt. And the toilet seat. And the wall. And the floor. And on a grown man’s leg.
The best part was that Matt didn’t actually notice that he got peed on until I came in there and kind of sporfled and died a thousand deaths.
But really it was funny. I mean, what’s a little pee?
On Sunday after nap time, I took the boys to my mom’s to swim in her pool. Chipmunk’s been taking these hippy-ass swim lessons that mostly consist of him getting gently sprayed in the face with squirty toys. Which is great and all, I guess, but I’d almost rather them just toss him into the deep end until he flails enough to manage forward propulsion. (I really, really want him to learn to swim. Pools make me nervous.)
Anyway he spent two full hours tooling around the warm pool in the late evening sun, his skinny little legs wiggling around. He wears swimmies and ends up looking kind of like something Inspector Gadget would construct for avoiding traffic.
I sat on the porch with the baby and watched him “swim.” At one point, he looked quiet and contemplative on the steps and my mom said, “Hey—do you need to pee?”
“No,” he responded calmly. He glanced up at me. A beat. “I’m just pooping.”
All hell broke loose. I practically threw the baby at my mom and ran out onto the pool deck and yanked him out of the water.
“Run to the fence, to the fence!” my mom shouted.
I got out into the grass and yanked his bathing suit off and exhaled heavily, relieved to find that he hadn’t pooped yet.
“Oh no!” he yelled, and at the same time dropped two of the most gigantic man-sized turds I’ve ever seen in my life onto his bathing suit and the grass and my feet. I shrieked like a little girl. It happened in an instant. I didn’t even know humans could shit that fast.
“OH NO MY FEET MY FEET GET IT OFF OH NO MY FEET GET IT OFF!” he wailed.
I squinted into the porch and struggled to breathe and noticed that my mom was also asphyxiating from laughing.
In the end, it wasn’t anything a long hard spray with the hose couldn’t handle.
Since then, we’ve had a few lengthy discussions about telling Mama when it’s time to poop.
Yesterday, after nap time, I decided to try grocery shopping with both boys for the first time in a few months. Now that it’s eleven thousand degrees outside, I avoid using the Moby Wrap or the Sleepy Wrap during the day. So I grabbed my Chic Tots ring sling, which has been working well in the heat because Moose is on my hip and the fabric isn’t stifling.
Grocery shopping wasn’t horrible. Other than Chipmunk telling an old man to stop looking at him and Chipmunk telling me about 40 times that he didn’t want to be “around all these strangers in this store,” it was pretty uneventful.
We got home and I stuck Chipmunk in his high chair (yes, I know he’s three) with his dinner and stuck Moose in the Pack n Play in the living room and I started unloading groceries. We have an open floor plan so they were both within eight feet of me the whole time.
Moose played happily, Chipmunk watched A Bug’s Life, and I got the groceries put away feeling quite satisfied about my awesomeness as a mom and my super great multi-tasking abilities. I even called my mother to brag about surviving the trip to the grocery store to buy wine.
I reached into the Pack N Play to grab Moose to nurse him and noticed orange stains all over his yellow onesie.
“Shit,” I observed.
So I cleaned him off on the changing table and brought him into the tub for a quick rinse. Then I toweled him off, stuck a fresh diaper on him, and put him in his baby jail (I’ve gated off part of their play room, also part of the open floor plan) before checking out the Pack N Play damage.
I don’t know how I failed to notice the piles of baby shit when I scooped him out the first time. It was everywhere. On the mesh. On the bottom. On the ball-pit-balls that immediately went into the trash. On the brand new wooden teether I picked up from Doobleh-Vay’s store. On. Everything.
I pinged Twitter several times for help. Calmly, of course.
Everyone laughed at me and told me to burn the Pack N Play. Thanks guys.
I pinged the Pack N Play and the Pack N Play told me to wipe it gently with a damp cloth, which kind of sounded like it was hitting on me.
In the end, I doused it with scrubbing bubbles and scrubbed it on the sidewalk out back (fun fact: natural sunlight really brings out poop stains you failed to notice inside, which makes me wonder if I actually got all the poop off the baby considering he had poop on his teether and oh my God did he ingest some poop?) and then completely ruined it by following my mom’s advice and using a hose on it. Now it’s drying (in the dark) on my fence and I’m hoping the Florida sun magically resurrects it tomorrow. Otherwise I guess I’ll be checking out Craigslist for a “new” one.
Anyway, I’m kind of hoping that no one shits or pees on anything related to people, swimming pools, or baby gear today.
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