Mendolonium

OK, so it wasn’t a bar, it was my living room.

After a long night I awoke yesterday morning to a chatty, happy baby (seemingly oblivious to her half dozen wake-ups during the night).  I rolled out of bed, got a bowl of cereal and popped Mary Poppins into the DVD player for Theodore, and whisked Anna off to the bathroom.   Despite the fact that Anna has the sleep skills of a 2 week old, she is rather competent at using the toilet.  She often wakes up dry and it is our routine to sit her on her wee little toilet in the morning to do her business.  After she finished I stepped a few feet away to grab some clothes for her out of the hall closet (poor third child in a two bedroom house doesn’t even have a closet).  In the few moments I was gone Anna decided that #1 wasn’t all she had in store and began to work on excrement #2.  Apparently this was not to be done on the toilet, but required a stroll out to the living room during the act.  I walked back into the bathroom to see a a trail of turds leading onto my living room rug where I found a gleeful baby pointing at her handiwork shouting “Dat dat dat!”  Theodore looked up from watching Mary Poppins and calmly observed,  “Annie pooped.  You should clean it up.”  Thanks kid.  That boy will yell for help at the top of his lungs if his blanket has even one wrinkle in it or if he can’t find the specific Lego he is looking for but when his baby sister decides to take a dump on the floor he says nothing until after the fact.  I took a deep (well, not too deep) breath and coaxed Annie over to the changing table to clean her up; her soiled sleeper billowing behind her like the cape of a tiny, very filthy, super heroine.  It quickly became clear that this was a DEFCON 1 sort of situation requiring a full bath.  I ran a shallow bubble bath for her (bubbles – I am quite nice in the face of adversity) and plopped a still delighted Anna into the cleansing waters.  I then grabbed a stack of old prefold cloth diapers, some cleaner, and went to work cleaning up the poopocalypse.  As I scrubbed the living room rug I noticed an ant, then another, then a whole trail of them marching into the living room to torment me.  It is been over a year since I last saw an ant try to invade our living room but they choose yesterday to make a stand.  I rewarded their bravery by squishing them in poopy diapers.  I was feeling like I had regained some modicum of control over the situation when I grabbed another clean diaper only to have a black spider crawl out at me; a black spider with red hourglass on its body.  My god!  Can’t a mother catch a break?  Apparently not.  I responded in the only way I reasonably could to a black widow in my living room; by screaming bloody murder and smashing the spider into oblivion.  I realized that Anna was ominously quiet in the bath and went in to to investigate.  I found that she was quiet because she had occupied herself by dumping the bathwater out onto the bathroom floor; bathwater that was full of a fresh load of crap.

At that point I called Jeff home from work to share the joy.  We cleaned up the children, the rug, and the floors.  Then Jeff took the kids to school so I could mercifully take a shower in peace; free from excrement, insects, and arachnids.  Now that, my friends, is true love.  It’s not flowers, or wine, or roses – love is the partner that will literally clean up shit with you; and laugh while you are doing it.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2013 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Anna, Parenting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.