Good Enough...For Me to Poop On!!  

I have copied and pasted, in all of its splendor and glory, my recounting of the most heinous infant crap-crime in history. The perpetrator: my daughter, Maggie. The scene: my downstairs bathroom, 7:05 AM, random morning before school.

This is the unedited version, so spelling, grammar, and punctuational consistency may be questionable.

The facts are not questionable.

This is an unembellished version of what happened.

Honestly.

For real.
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…as I picked Maggie up to take her out to the truck, I caught a whiff of the worst stomach-churning, acrid-sweet smell I’ve ever smelled. My left hand, placed under her bottom to lift her, apparently squished all the crap up and out of her diaper, over the lip of her pants and onto my hand.

I freak and gag. Maggie laughs and squeals.

I realize that I obviously have to change her, but anywhere I put her down will have crap on it…so, I put her in the downstairs bathtub.

Once she’s there, I see that there is crap up her back now, too. I try to get her shirt and jacket off, but they have crap on them and it streaks up her back and shoulders, making a faux-skunk stripe on her. I place them at the one end of the tub. I gag again and turn toward the toilet in case anything happens.

When I look back, Maggie has done a barrel roll in the tub and now has a thin, smeary belt of doody on her torso and is trying to push into a crawling position. Crap on my hands, I grab her arms, turn her on her back, and try to remover her pants and then diaper. Pants come off quite easily when lubricated with dung. The diaper, however, was another story. The thing practically disintegrates and roughly one pound of grayish-green dooky spills onto her legs (she’s now shrieking and squealing with glee).

I get up to grab some wipes from my office so I can start trying to wipe the worst off of Maggie’s legs, I realize that there are many spooky little baby hand prints all over the inside of the tub. Maggie had decided to do some finger painting and had now given herself a sort of poop-scarf around her neck. I frantically tear off toilet paper and wipe the crap off her hands and neck and chest and come to the realization I should have had the minute I found the poop on her in the first place—she needs to be stripped and bathed.

So, without removing my little tar-baby from the tub, I turn the water on, which is freezing. Maggie gasps, cries, and then commences to pee in this odd little squirty arc, which doesn’t matter much since it can’t get much worse than the layer of pooh covering her legs (I had visions of Ross crying into the phone to Joey, “It’s formed a paste!”).

I slide Maggie up to the high end of the tub, where she decides it’s time to do gymnastics. Her head goes right onto the poopy part of her shirt and now she’s got diarrhea on her ear and matted in her hair. With one hand, I hold her down and try not to let her squirm in the crap more, while I use my other hand to adjust the water temp.

Father and daughter, locked in a deadly game of mud-wrestling and both cursing each other, fight for their lives.

I succeed in getting the water warm and, using the tub like a Poop-N’-Slide, maneuver Maggie under the faucet and steer the clumps of doody down the drain and the smeared feces off her body (down the drain, also). Luckily, this is where Shannon bathes Maggie normally, so the baby wash is handy. I rub her down GOOD with the soap, clear the crap from her hair, give her a good twice over to check for more fecal matter, and then…how do I, dressed in my teacher clothes, which, by the way, have stayed miraculously dooky free through the ordeal, lift a squirmy, slippery little monkey like this without dropping her, and where do I put her while I try to get a clean towel to dry her off?

Maggie gets strapped into her bouncy-chair in my office, naked, wet, cold, and screaming, while Daddy careens up the stairs and retrieves a bath towel. I return, toss the towel over Maggie to let her warm up, go to the bath, try my best to clear the remains of the dookie down the drain. Once most of it is gone (sorry, Shannon, there’s a little more to take care of tonight when we get home), I sigh with semi-relief now that the major portion of the disaster is passed. I wipe hand over my forehead and then scratch my goatee, as I’ve now been sweating profusely, and stand to go wash my hands…my hands…that just…touched…my face.

I stand before myself in the mirror of my downstairs bathroom, my daughter’s crap darkening my brow and beard, sweating, tired, and defeated. If I could survive a bath in steaming acid, I would have taken one right then. I go to wash myself in the sink…Shannon, can you pick up some more hand soap from Target on your way home this evening? We’re out…

Once I’m taken care of (in the kitchen sink, using dish soap), I return to Maggie and dry her off (she’s calmed by now and is now giggling at something—most likely, me).

Well…Maggie and I survived. She’s at day care, happy, safe, warm, and playing with her cousin, McKinley—I promise you, Krystal, Maggie is fecal-free—but she does look like a clown (vertically striped pink, green, brown Old Navy pants and horizontally striped pink and white shirt with a picture of Frosty the Snowman on the chest, black socks). I made it to school—a little late—without having to change my clothes.

I will cleanse the tub when I get home (the crapped-upon clothes are sitting on a box in the garage…I felt like burning them in the sort of ritual that holy-men use to destroy purely evil entities).

I just wanted you to know about my morning and why, Shannon, I bothered you this morning on the phone when you had kids in your room.
Thanks. I want to play some World of Warcraft now…and then sleep…but, it’s time to get back to grading some papers and teaching these high schoolers...and dealing with their crap.