The Parental Learning Curve: Poop-o-Mania 2015

I like to think I have a brain cell or two floating around in my head. But my daughter has proven that this may not be the case as she puts me through my first semester of Parenting School. My courses have included Living With No Sleep, Diapering for Dummies, and To-Do Lists: Interrupted. The Bodily Fluids 101 class? I failed miserably.

For the first month of Avery’s life, there was little to no spit up. She’d give a good burp after eating, but she’d happily keep all of her food down. But then to keep us on our toes, she decided to start spitting up. Of course, it took me awhile to adjust to the new phenomenon, so remembering to have a burp cloth on hand proved extremely challenging for my sleep-deprived brain. My husband quickly grew used to my urgent calls to “Get me something!” to clean up the mess. One night she spit up while I was holding her, and  he preemptively jumped up to come to my rescue.

I told him not to bother because she’d spit up straight down my shirt.

With warm, regurgitated milk in my cleavage, we headed upstairs to clean up. She needed a bath anyway and I now needed a shower. So I took off her diaper and gambled on getting to the bathroom with her bare baby butt.

Remind me not to go to Las Vegas.

We got to the bathroom and it must have been the running water, because the little girl could hold it no longer. She had to go, and peed right on my hip and down my leg. What’s another pair of jeans in the wash at this point?

So to make her trifecta complete, the next morning, she managed to blow through her pajamas and her blanket to get poop on our bedsheets. Add sheets and our mattress cover to the wash.

Little did I know that she was preparing me for the coup de grace, what I have dubbed Poop-o-Mania 2010. We were in the glider; she was chowing down. I don’t know if I heard it first, felt it or just had a weird sense, but all of a sudden I knew there was poop everywhere. I knocked the dog off my lap (because yes, she manages to sit on my lap while I’m breastfeeding), stood up and well, Poop-o-Mania 2010 had commenced. There was poop on my shirt. Poop on my jeans. Poop through to my underwear. Poop on the glider cushions. Poop on the carpet.

The most impressive part? It’s like she had direct aim. The poop made it through her clothes, through the cushions and shot about a foot out the back of the glider. To this day, I don’t know if it shot out the foot of her long pants or whether it came out the top of her diaper and did a U-Turn. It’s one of those mysteries in life I’ll never know. But I do know one thing: Bodily Fluids 101 is definitely no easy A.—Erin