Beware...the fog!

If I've learned one thing through becoming a parent, it's that you should never expect things to go as planned. Ever. Everevereverever. If at some point you actually find yourself on schedule, it is at that very point that you should stop what you're doing and take a mental survey of the scene around you...because you know that at some point very soon...the shit is going to hit the fan. For example...say it's a regular Monday evening...a bath night. Your children are squealing with glee at the idea of said upcoming bath, and you actually find yourself with plenty of time to complete the pre-bedtime to-do list that you've mentally layed out for yourself. Too good to be true, right? Indeed. And so I discovered the other night...

Everything was going well...pretty much as described above. The girls were in the bath together...bath time rituals were well in progress...shampoo in Big's hair...rubrubrub...rinserinserinse...whinewhinewhine...a little soap in the eyes, and little water in the mouth, rinse and repeat. You know, the usual, and then it was Little's turn...and here's where my "on schedule" evening went incredibly astray.

I had no sooner dunked Little's wash cloth in the bath water and turned to grab her shampoo, when I turned back to see a strange fog of darkness, and field of buoyant debris suddenly surrounding her. "Oh, dear God" I thought, and I knew immediately what it was. It was that which I had been dreading since deciding that giving the girls baths together was a good idea. It was poo fog. Without thinking, I gathered as much breath in my lungs as I could muster and screamed "SHIIIIIIT!!! Hubbbbyyyyyyyy!" and then moved into action as fast as I could to try to minimize the collateral damage. I grabbed a stunned Big under the arms and tried to lift her out of the tub as fast as I could, before the fog made it's way over to her side of the bath water. Not yet sure what was going on, she initially resisted my efforts at being removed, and it was at that point that the emergency mode switch flipped inside my head and the urgency in my voice became apparent to her. She looked up at me questioningly and, without thinking, I looked straight into my 3 year-old's face and yelled "Get out! Get out! It's pooooooooooooooo!!" which got her moving just a little bit faster. Heh. (Desperate times, you know??) Hubby then came running into the room to see what was wrong (As I don't normally scream expletives in front of our children. Really.) and upon entering the room, stopped on a dime and joined me in my utter sense of horror as, for a moment, we paused and stood in solidarity at the edge of the tub...looking on in awe and disgust while our smallest family member smiled and cooed up at us from a bathtub full of dietary disaster. Disaster, indeed.

What happened next is sort of a blur. I know that I wrapped Little in a towel and handed her to Hubby to quarantine her while I searched my soul for a way to somehow, someway clean up the mess. Taking a deep breath, I reached my hand into the toilet, I mean bath, water and pulled the drain plug...watching as the frighteningly identifiable floaty pieces of filth made their way down the drain. Big wrapped herself in a towel and sat in a crumpled pile at my feet on the bathroom rug, repeatedly bringing various parts of her body to her nose and sniffing them, while begging me for reassurance. *sniffsniff* "Mama, do my feet smell like poo?" she said. *sniffsniff* "Mama, my legs smell like poo." *sniffsniff* "Mama do I have poo on my hands?" I held back my giggles as best as I could, while reassuring her that she, in fact, did not smell like poo and was going to get a shower really really soon..."Just as soon as I find a way to remove this bathtub, destroy it, and bring in a new, clean tub that has never been violated to the likes that I witnessed this evening" I thought. But in the end, that just wasn't practical...so I cleaned it up...which went something like this: rinserinserinse, bleachbleachbleach, gaggaggag, rinserinserinse, and repeat...and after about 10 minutes, we were back in business.

So back into the tub Big went for a shower, while Little (rather joyfully and obliviously) waited, covered in her own filth, for her turn to be de-germified. Big was a champ, Little would prove to be more difficult.

You'd think the story would end here, really, in that "isn't that bad enough??" kind of way...but such was not our luck. It seems that all that silly waiting around stuff had taken it's toll on our Littlest girl's mood, and by the time we were able to get her into her second round of bathwater, she had had it up to here *points to eyebrows* with this whole fiasco. As her bath chair had been violated minutes earlier in poo-gate 2009, it was no longer an option for me to use to keep her from having a tantrum and drowning herself, as she was threatening to do in her own "I can't talk yet, but you know exactly what I'm saying" baby way...so I called in the big guns. I asked Hubby to come in and help me. Sensing my desperation and Little's quickly deteriorating mood, Hubby cut to the chase and decided to forgo the whole trying to hold the slippery baby under the arms routine and instead rolled up the legs of his jeans and bravely climbed in to stand in the tub next to Little. His mission: to get a firm hold on Little while I suds'd her up and rinsed her off as fast as I could so we could get her crabby, tired little baby buns to bed. Easy enough, right? And then he saw it...


Hubby: What's that?


Me: (in a dismissive tone) What? *scrubscrubscrub*


Hubby: THAT! *points emphatically to a teeny tiny, but quite obviously present poo flake floating ever-closer to him as he stood, ankle deep, in the bathwater. Every move he made to thwart it, instead brought it that much closer.*


Me: *Trying not to lose my poker face* Uhh...that's poo residue! *shudder*


Hubby: (grimacing and visibly dying a little bit inside.) Oh, sonofabitch!!!


And it was at that point that I actually started to laugh. REALLY LAUGH. And Hubby did too, really! Because in a crappy (excuse the pun) situation like this...you have two choices...you can either get all crazy frustrated and cry about it, or you can find someway to laugh about it. We choose to laugh. Because really? The day we lose our sense of humor is that day you may as well call up the insane asylum and tell 'em to reserve a couple of beds and a game of checkers for Hubby and I. There's just no other way to survive this parenting gig in our household.

And by the end of the night everything had eventually worked itself out anyway...everyone was clean, the girls were in bed asleep (albeit an hour later than we had planned), toys and bath seat had been restored to pristine poo-free condition, and we found that we had a brilliant new song to sing to crack each other up...made up by my fabulous composer of a Hubby and sung to the tune of "Stuck on You" by Lionel Richie, it goes...


"I'm Stuck on You

I'm a little piece of doody that came out of your poo

Yeah I'm ooooooon your leg

It's been a nasty day."


Yep, still makes me laugh. Thank God.