I’ve been MIA for longer than I had planned. The summer was very busy, and having everyone home made it challenging to find the time to sit down and write. I’ve had so many ideas, but always found something else that was a higher priority than blogging.
UNTIL TODAY. This morning something so remarkable happened that I HAD to make time to type it out.
Have I got your attention?? I’m sure you’re all on the edge of your seats, the suspense building to the point where it’s unbearable!
It started as a typical day- lots of yelling, loud footsteps running around on the hardwood, spilling of cereal, and chaos in general. It wasn’t until Miles noticed a funky smell in the air that the morning took a turn for the worse. “Mommy, something smells terrible!”…and then Maisie’s sniffer caught wind of it: “Mommy, it smells disgusting in here! Somebody pooped!”
This is not unusual. As the famous book states: Everyone poops!! It seems like people in our house poop more than the typical person because not a day goes by that I don’t hear the words “Mommy! Come see this poo!” coming from the bathroom. But this was a different kind of poopy smell. This smelled what fear would smell like if fear had a smell (maybe this is what people mean when they say “dogs can smell fear”…and if so, those poor pups!!)
Back to our morning…I knew right away that it was our master pooper, Sully. He is known city-wide for his buttmudd. As soon as I picked him up to begin the process of cleaning him up I realized this was not a normal everyday turd.
I laid him down to get to work…and before I could catch myself a phrase that we frown upon in our house (OH MY GOD) escaped my lips a number of times. I think it was shock, or disgust, or perhaps concern. Looks of surprise came from the other 3 kids (mommy said a bad word!!!)…but I honestly couldn’t control my reaction. I had never seen anything like it.
Sullivan, being our 4th baby means we are no strangers to changing dirty diapers. For kicks, a few months ago I completed one of those online calculators that tells you how many hours of sleep you have lost and how many diapers you have changed since you became parents…according to their formula we have changed somewhere around 23,760 diapers. We have had our fair share of poopsplosions, but this was like nothing I had witnessed before. There was literally poop from the bottoms of his feet to his ears. HE WAS COVERED.
Here’s a bit of information people may not know, and instead of making this entire post a disgusting retell of my morning, I thought I would attempt to share some wisdom. I actually didn’t know this until we had Maisie, but did you know that many onesies (diaper shirts as some people refer to them as) have an emergency exit path? Yes, if you look closely you will see that at the neck area there are spots that make the hole a bit bigger than it needs to be….that is so that in cases such as these, you can pull the shirt DOWN over the baby’s body, instead of UP over their head. That way, if the shirt is covered in crap, you don’t get it on their face/in their hair…you get the point!
Emergency Exit Route
Well, unfortunately for me, the shirt he was wearing this morning did NOT have that alternate exit, so I made my own. I called for help from my surgical assistants… “grab me the scissors. STAT!!” This wasn’t a job for the crappy dull children’s scissors though, I needed the big guns: the sharp, cut through beer can scissors. Once they were in my hand I proceeded to do the only logical thing: I cut that poopy shirt right off my even poopier baby. And let’s just say that everything he was wearing got a one way ticket to the garbage bag (thank GOODNESS tomorrow is garbage day!!)
It took a good 45 minutes to clean up the trail Sully had created through the house, not a square inch of the floor remained “unsullied” …but the kids thought it was hilarious. Each one of them had a bottle of Thieves cleaner and they were excited every time they found a new “treasure” to tackle.
To say that our typical mornings run smoothly is an overstatement, but this morning was even more of a gong show than usual. Thank goodness the big kids can actually pull it together when they REALLY want to, and we were able to get everyone to school on time. Even with the biggest, brownest commotion of all time!
And that, ladies and gentlemen brings us to the end of this filthy tale. If you’ve stayed with me all the way through the disgusting details, I thank you. I promise my next posts won’t be quite as nasty (actually, I suppose I can’t promise that, but I do swear to do my best!!)
(Quasi) Organized Chaos 