toddlerspit

I’m pretty convinced that motherhood is all about the tiny indignities, the bringing you down to size (around two feet, if you have a toddler).

It starts with pregnancy.  I don’t know too many pregnant women who didn’t fart like maniacs their entire pregnancy.  I have a friend who told me that practically every step she took was punctuated with a little squeak from behind (Right.  A “friend.”).  You grow hair in strange places, your genitalia swells, you have increased vaginal discharge, stretch marks, and you’re puking at anything that smells stronger than a violet.  Gag if you want, but hey.  This is what it takes to propagate the species.

Childbirth is, of course, the gagfest of all gagfests,  in addition to being the most amazing experience of my life.  I belonged to an online discussion board of pregnant women when I was expecting Nolie, and was surprised to learn that 90% of them pooped during childbirth.  I did.  Both times.  It makes sense, right?  I mean, you’re pushing harder than you’ve ever pushed in your life down there.  No surprise that a little poopsy flies out now and then.  Still, it came as a total shock to me both times–I didn’t even know I had done it.  I was so out of it after Nolie was born that I told the nurse, “I think the baby pooped–can you clean her up?”  “Oh, no, honey.” she said. “That was you.”

Having written this, I’m sure I’ll get all sorts of comments from women who didn’t poop on the table.  My gorgeous sister-in-law Julie, who took about five minutes to have both her babies, probably didn’t.  But most women do–they just don’t know it, and everyone was kind enough not to tell them.  I dwell on this because pooping in front of people is potentially my worst case scenario in life.  I’d rather do anything–lick razor blades, eat fish guts, whatever–than poop in front of somebody.  But there you go.  I did it.  I pooped in front of a lot of people.  Twice.  All in the name of having kids.  If that isn’t an argument to have a c-section, I don’t know what is.

Then, there’s the motherhood itself.  I’ll be sitting and reading with Addie, smelling her hair and enjoying the yummy deliciousness of my quiet moments with her, and BAM.  Booger on the arm.  She’ll just pick her nose and leave a little nose boulder on my wrist.  Why?  Why not rub it on the sheet?  Or eat it, like most kids?

Because moms are the repository of all things bodily.  We clean up pee, poop, and puke.  Hairballs and dingleberries.  Boogers, snot, spit, drool, urp.  So why not wipe a booger on my arm?  I mean, look at me.  I smell like rotten cheese from Nolie constantly spitting up on me.  I probably have an old diaper stuck to my shoe.  Every coat I own has wipies in the pocket.

So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised last night when, as I’m walking Nolie around in the sling, Eric stops making dinner and says, “Honey?  You have something coming out the back of your pants.”  And proceeds to pull out a wad of toilet paper from the top of my jeans.  I had been peeing earlier when some kid emergency propelled me from the pot and the t.p. got stuck. 

Thank God it wasn’t poopy.

But, still.  I mean, Christ.  Not exactly a recipe for a sultry night of hot lovin’ with your man.  I’m waving goodbye to my last shred of dignity now.  Who needs it, anyway?  Not a mom.  Not me.

Occasionally I take a bath with Addie at night.  Not too often, because I typically like my baths scalding hot, and boiling your toddler is not recommended.  But every once in a while, I brave the tepid water and jump in with the kid, which she loves.

But let me backtrack.  Have I mentioned that Addie can fart like a sailor?  I used to work at a truck stop, and this kid could put those guys to shame, both in terms of volume and odor.  She is definitely our kid.

Basically, our approach to bodily functions is to laugh at them, because we are a family that has a lot of bodily functions.  So, when someone toots, we typically make a big production out of it.  As in, “Holy cow!  Did a truckload of skunks just get slaughtered?  Or did Daddy toot?  Peeeee-uuuuu!  Way to go, Sir Toots-A-Lot!”  And so on.  You get the picture.  We’re pretty much constantly joking about toots around here, and Addie gets her fair share as the heir apparent to the Kingdom of Tootsville.

Addie is particularly skilled at tooting in the bath tub, which is occasion for much drama, because we all know what happens to a toot in the tub–loud and stinky, right?

Do you know where I’m going with this?

All this is by way of saying that we aren’t shy about tooting around here, and that we talk about tooting a lot, and we toot a lot, and it makes us all laugh like idiots.  So, tonight, in the tub, (oh god, I can’t believe I’m writing about this), I let a big toot fly.  Or gurgle, rather.

But instead of laughing and saying something like, “Mommy, you tooted!  You’re so funny!”  Addie looks at me, completely straight-faced, waits the most perfect comic beat, and then says, “Mommy?  That’s why we don’t toot in the tub.”

I stand corrected.  Apparently, we are no longer a family that toots in the tub.  Good to know.

Or out, as the case may be.

My new theory is that my blogging makes Nolie poop.  She just pooped twice (after doing a big one Monday).  The past several times she has pooped have been while she’s sitting in my lap as I type this blog. 

It’s like when I walk into a Barnes and Noble.  All those neatly stacked rows of reading material and…bam.  Need to poop.  Same thing for her.  My lap is her Barnes and Noble.

Or else, the formula thing is working.

I’m sorry to do this to you, dear readers, but this will be yet another post about…you guessed it!  Poop.

I hear Addie stirring after a long nap this afternoon, and go in to check on her.  Little did I know that she would be stirring her own poop.

Yep.  She had yet again pulled off her pull-up (grrr….) and on her pillow was a perfect, unmarred impression of her butt.  In poop. 

I’m not sure about the mechanics of this.  Did she poop in her pull-up, then roll around on her butt for a while to get it evenly spread on both cheeks, then carefully remove her pants, make the buttprint on her pillow, then stand up, making no other marks anywhere? 

Sheer artistry.

So, I walk in, and she’s standing there, her poopy pants around her ankles, poop all down her legs, holding her arms out, looking horrified, like Carrie at the prom.

To my credit, I did not freak out.  I just put her in her bath, talked to her again about what a good idea it would be to poop in the potty, and threw a load of laundry in. 

I wanted to freak out.  Oh, did I want to.  But I couldn’t–she was so bummed (ha-ha) at the situation that I couldn’t make it worse for her.  When I gently suggested that next time she could go poop in the potty she said, “Yes, Mommy.  I will go poop in the potty.”  And I know she probably won’t.  Still, I was proud of her for thinking it might be a good idea.  There’s always hope.

1.  Your 3-month-old has a history of only pooping every 7-10 days; when she does poop, it is as if a mustard bomb has exploded.  You are sitting with her propped in your lap, busily firing off emails.  You hear a wet, farty sound that suggests a poop has arrived (it has been eight days).  Do you:

a)  Get up immediately to change the baby’s diaper; you know if you don’t, the mustard will, literally, hit the ceiling fan;

b)  Answer just a few more emails.  Hey, if she’s not bothered, why should you be?

c)  Give the baby away to the church down the street.  Only a man of God can deal with a disaster of these proportions?

Answer:  B.  When you get up, poo is seeping out both sides of the diaper, front and back, and you are covered in poo.  But, hey, your emails got answered and you get to keep the baby.

2.  Your 2 1/2-year-old toddler has surreptitiously snuck a full pull-up into the laundry basket, and you run the load without noticing.  Do you:

a)  Express astonishment at the gigantic balloon that emerges from the washing machine after it has finished running, shaking your head in disbelief that the pull-up is able to hold SO much water, and fretting over what these things are doing to our landfills;

b)  Curse at the million little particles of disintegrated pull-up collected in the bottom of the washing machine;

c)  Continue to run several more loads of laundry without cleaning out the particles, so that all of your clothes and linens for the week are coated in pull-up pustules, which itch and chafe;

d)  All of the above?

Answer:  D.  Goddammit.

3)  Your toddler has yet again reached into her diaper and touched her poo.  Do you:

a)  Silently gag, taking her to the bathroom to wash her hands, reminding her for the gazillionth time that touching our poo can make us very, very sick, as you try not to overreact because you don’t want to give her Freudian scat issues for the rest of her life;

b)  Poop in your own pants, modeling for her how you don’t touch your poo, and neither should she;

c)  Reach into her pull-up, screech like a monkey, and throw the poo on the wall?

Answer:  A.  PhEW.

Like the oh-so spooky, shadowy picture of Nolie?  Happy Halloween, folks.

Addie’s fine.  Just an ear infection in both ears (just!).  Nobody seemed to concerned when we told them that our kid couldn’t hear (couldn’t hear!).  The doctors just gave us more of that pink amoxycillin, the kind they’ve been prescribing to kids forever.  I can still remember what it tastes like, for chrissakes.  So, anyway.  We’re hopefully on the road to recovery.  Except the doctor said we can plan on her being sick throughout the winter because she’s in preschool.  Yay.  Like working moms don’t have enough to feel guilty about. 

So now I can go back to worrying about the non-essential things, such as the fact that Addie has peed or pooped on almost everything we own, and that she peed on everything in the doctor’s office today.  And that she has finger-painted objects in her room with her poop.  Now, I love my child, and poop is just a fact of life, but really.  Really, folks.  No, really.  This is too much. 

This from an otherwise angelic child, my good sleeper, my girl who loves to read and make art and sing.  This is her one area of rebellion.  And boy, is she rebelling.

We started the whole potty training thing this summer because, honestly, I thought it would be nice to have Addie potty trained before Nolie came.  And, at first, it seemed like it was going to be nice.  Addie sat on her little portable potty and went pee.  Several times.  No problem, no fuss, no nothing.  I’m pretty sure I could be quoted as saying something like, “What’s the big deal with potty training?  I don’t get it.  It’s so easy!”

Ha. 

There has been no single thing more frustrating than potty training.  Not getting kids to sleep through the night, not colic, not fussy eating, nothing.  This has almost killed me, my friends. 

So, the doctor gave us permission today to stop.  That’s it–we can just stop.  We’re just not ready.  Addie’s not ready.  And she is much, much stronger than us.  “In a war of wills,” the doc said, “you will not win.”  Boy, was he right.  I was so grateful I almost hugged him.  When we got home, I gleefully put away the potty seats, the underwear, the stepstools, the potty charts, and happily put Addie’s pull-ups back on, figuring she’ll tell us when she’s ready to start up again. 

Right?

This is a picture of my friend Ashley and her daughter Scout with us at People’s Fair this year.  Ashley has that awesome vibe of the first-time mom, totally blissed out and relaxed.  I love hanging out with her because her Buddhattitude is contagious and because she’s not afraid to breastfeed in public.  It’s nice to have someone you can hang out with and who understands the need to plop down in the middle of the mall and whip your boob out to calm down your kid.  If we were lightbulbs, Ashley would be that soft, kind light you like to have on when you’re reading late at night. 

I, on the other hand, am currently the harsh fluorescent kind, vibrating at this annoying frequency, running around trying to corral two children.  Oh, every once in a while I get a glimpse of the softlight me, like when Addie and Nolie are cuddling up to me, and I’m managing to read a book to them both without anyone screaming.  Or when nobody’s nose is running.  (Okay, that’s never really happened.  But if it did, I’d be softlight).  But when I’ve got both girls, I mostly feel fluorescent, in a Vegas Strip sort of way.  I wonder if other people see me vibrating, or if it’s just an internal frenetic energy.

Today’s exciting news:  first, I did not light myself on fire at all today.  Not even once.  Second, Nolie let forth two giant fecal emissions (sound the alarm, Beyonce), thus relieving the gastastrophe that had been brewing.  It probably sounds weird to be so excited about poop, but I am.  Mama’s gonna sleep tonight!

On a more somber note (I know, what could be more somber than poop?), we have yet again let Addie get so sick that by Friday evening she needs to go to the doctor.  Her ears are hurting again, and she can’t hear very well, and the runny nose has reached epic proportions.  To test this, I asked her three times if she wanted chocolate cake, and she didn’t respond.  Normally she’ll scratch your eyes out to get chocolate cake, so I consider this a very scientific experiment.  The results indicate some seriously f*&^ed up sinuses. 

So, I ask you this:  how the heck are you supposed to know if your kid has a virus or a bacterial infection?  I mean, doctors are always lecturing you about not bringing your kids in if they have “just a virus.”  But these viruses always seem to brew into infections in Addie.  There’s no green boogers, no wildly high temperature, no oozing pustules.  But invariably, Addie gets an ear infection.  On Friday night.  When the doctor’s office is closed for two more days. 

Maybe Mama’s not going to sleep tonight after all.