Mar 20, 2005

The One About Poop

Not for the faint of heart. Please visit some other more intellectually or spiritually elevated blog for today's reading, if you cannot stomach the earthy nature of this post. That includes even the ghost of Jonathan Swift. Thank you kindly.

Because Will drank a quantity of Jack's juice this morning, which was spiked with a little Miralax, which Jack needs and Will does not, there emanated from his bottom a quantity, consistency, and forcefulness of poop that caused John and me to marvel exceedingly. (And yes, the child still wears a diaper. That's for another post you can look forward to.) When we were done washing off his heels, penis, and knees, and when we had put his shirt, left sock, jeans, and changing pad in the laundry tub to soak, we reminisced fondly about the old days. . .

J: (soft, hushed, reverent voice) "Wow, he hasn't had a poop like that since he was a baby."
L: (enthusiastically)"It was a blowout! Remember those?"
(Pause.)
J: "Ah, yes . . . . those were the days, weren't they?"
(J and L hold hands and gaze into each other's eyes.)

And just the other day we were saying how great it is that we don't need to worry about Jack's poop any more. We don't even need to wipe his bottom. A few months ago we were having dinner guests, and during a comfortably quiet lull in the conversation, whilst we were sipping our pinot in the candlelight, Jack yelled "Wipe my bottom!" at a decibel level fit for a referee. We still need to check to make sure he has flushed, but in general we seem to be almost entirely absent from his pooping experience.

This return to the "blowout" of infancy takes me down memory lane. I remember the time Jack, at 11 months, pooped in an empty box shortly after his bath. Very handy. Then there was the time he squirmed and kicked violently in mid diaper change, flinging a medium size turd somewhere----where? How could we lose a turd? Oh, there it was, behind the bureau. They are so much easier to pick up when they've had two days to dry up, don't you know. When Jack was 16 months old, he pooped in his bathwater. When he saw the long brown coil that had come out of him he screamed in terror. We could not get that child to sit down in the bathtub for about eight months after that.

And then there was the time I found a large fresh one in the sandbox. "Gee," I thought to myself in a Pooh-like way, "I don't remember seeing a large mammal defecating in the sandbox in the last 10 minutes." Then I observed that the heaviness of Will's diaper had gotten the better of the Velcro fasteners, and the diaper had slipped mostly through his shorts, some of the contents having escaped.

One time in grad school we had a contest to see who had gotten the most disgusting substance on their dissertation, and the father of a baby got the prize. People who don't have children tend to find baby poop disgusting, but I don't any more. I almost kind of miss the yellow newborn kind . . . . Someone please stop me.

FIFTEEN-MINUTE PAUSE

I'm back. I'm so inspired by this post that I just told a bedtime story about Sir Poopie Poopsalot, a poop inside Will who begged to be set free in the toilet, to spin downward in that beautiful spiral, which all poops deserve, not to be squashed in a diaper and thrown in the trash! Dignity for poops everywhere!! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!! Gurgle . . . gurgle.
(Loud flushing sound)

4 comments:

Scrivener said...

Hilarious post! How old are Will and Jack again? Ella's just turned 4 and we're still usually involved with the bottom wiping. And we're still definitely involved in talking about the poop.

The very first time my wife and I tried to go out into the world after our oldest was born, when she was 2 weeks old, she had a blowout wet poop that somehow entirely missed the diaper--seriously, the diaper was near-perfectly clean--and went down her leg all over her overalls and out the leg onto my wife's shirt. We had brought neither of them a change of clothes. It was our first lesson in what to put in the diaper bag before leaving the house.

Lauren D. McKinney said...

Trial by fire? An excellent way to start.

Jack was 5 in November and Will was 3 in November. I think that anyone who uses the word "actually" correctly should be using the toilet, no?

jo(e) said...

I laughed aloud at this post but it also made me feel all warm and sentimental about the days when my kids were in diapers.

Whenever new mothers ask me what their infants' poop is SUPPOSED to look like, I always tell them hummus. Some of them have stopped eating hummus as a result. But when I eat hummus it makes me feel all nostalgic.

Liz Miller said...

I love this post and I love Scrivener for sending me over here!

Poop's been on my mind alot lately too, since Muffin Man is now a potty-meister.

You reminded me of a blowout he once had that actually came out the top of his onesie and got into his ears.