Wine Please

This is what I found on my bed the other morning:

Yeah, I thought the same thing as you…who the heck pooped on my freshly washed sheets??? As I got closer I was starting to realize what it truly was:

and thank the good Lord above, it wasn’t poop.

Instead, it used to be this guy:

I just told Justin that he and one of the cats are the only ones who haven’t gotten some sort of bodily discharge on me.
Wanna hear more? With that kind of intro, how could you not???

• 4:30am this morning, our friends’ dog, Khali (who is staying with us while they are out of town), put her big ol’ nose and paw on me, indicating she had to go out. I told her to buzz off and went back to sleep.
• At 5am-ish, I thought I smelled something suspiciously poopie…but I chalked it up to Ginger’s smelly butt and turned over back to sleep.
• 6:20am Justin is in the kitchen and calls me over the phone intercom-thingy to tell me that Khali had explosive diarrhea on the steps. I groggily ask, “and I’m supposed to clean it?” He answered in the affirmative and added that if he touched it, he would probably puke from the smell. Yay! Thanks! I can’t wait!
• Ten minutes later I was cleaning up the diarrhea…after an hour, I got 99% of it cleaned up and ran to get ready for work. Thank goodness school is finally out, because it only took me 45 minutes to get there without using the HOV lane (Justin took Cooper to school this a.m. because there was no way to corral him while I got ready for school).
• I leave work about 5:30pm and don’t get home until nearly 7pm. I walk in the door and Gavin says “hey mommy! watch out! Khali pooped!” and pointed out the smelly pile of butt-explosion on my kitchen area rug. I shoot a dirty look at Justin that he kept the poop for me to clean up. Again. This time the damage is so bad that we had to throw out the whole rug and rug pad.
• So Justin takes the rug and rug pad out to the neighbor’s dumpster, and I finish cleaning up the floor. I bring the waste from the cleanup out to the garage. Justin and I walk back in the house together and Gavin is sprawled on the floor, laying on his side and wailing that he fell. Turns out he slipped on the wet floor where I just cleaned up the poop and fell.
• Turns out he also had a potty accident at school…yay, more smelly laundry.
• While Justin brings Khali home (sorry pup…can’t do more exploding diarrhea), I get the kids cleaned up for bed, get Gavin in bed and settle down to give Cooper his milk. He sucked it down so fast that he gags and pukes all over both of us. Glad I didn’t start that load of laundry for Gavin!
• I come downstairs and see that one of the cats has yakked in his food bowl (again) and another one sneezed in my face when I greeted him.
• Maggie sees one of her balls behind the baker’s rack and gets so crazed about it that she starts sneezing and snotting on me.
• I mop the floor one last time and sit down with some popcorn and chocolate milk, which brings the mooch, Ginger, who drools on me until I chase her off. And clean up the couch where some of the drool landed.

Now I’m going to finish the laundry, go to bed, and see if maybe I can stay poop/puke/sneeze/drool-free for a few hours.

I know I joke about all of the cleaning, but I’m completely serious about helping all those folks in the Mid-West, who at this point, have hardly begun to clean up behind the floods. Please help them here.

I have come to the conclusion that I can no longer be naked in front of Gavin.

I actually should’ve decided and acted on this about a year ago. I was very pregnant and Gavin was just 3 years old. Usually if I was the only one home with Gavin, I would wait until he took a nap to squeeze in a shower because I couldn’t quite trust him to stay put in front of the TV, particularly if I had to shave (which was a really lengthy process when trying to find your legs somewhere under a big ol’ belly). So on this particular day, he’s sleeping and I jump in the shower. I’m about half done and he comes in the bathroom. I just want to finish my shower with out worrying about what he’s getting into, so I ask him if he wants to come in the shower with me and open the shower door.
G: yucky! (he points just under my belly, towards my crotch)
I look down, but of course can only see this massive belly:

Me: what do you mean “yucky”, buddy?
G: poopie! (he points at my crotch again)
Me: what do you mean “poopie?!” (craning neck to see around my belly and to look on the shower floor to see if my water broke or if I was bleeding or if I lost control of my bowels. Nope.)
G: yucky poopie, mommy. need wipe. (continuing to point at my crotch, this time a little closer)
I look around the massive belly and see he is pointing at my pubic hair! He thinks the wet hair is poop! I start laughing so hard I slip and nearly fall in the shower, which gets me laughing harder. Not knowing what I’m laughing at, Gavin leaves the bathroom to go play trains.
That was a year ago. Since then I’ve been in front of Gavin in various states of undress and he’s not said anything. When nursing Cooper, he once asked what I was doing. I answered simply, “I’m feeding Cooper. Cooper is eating.” Content with that answer, Gavin went back playing. Periodically if he was paying attention to me and/or Cooper, he’d point out that “Cooper eatin’” anytime I was nursing him. But he never seemed to notice that my shirt was half-off, or if he was in our room while I was getting ready in the morning, he never said anything.
That all changed Monday morning. I had just gotten out of the shower and Gavin came in and was talking to me as I dried off. Out of nowhere, he points at my crotch.
G: whas dis?
Me: uh, hair.
G: (eyes me suspiciously, looks at the hair on my head, then back at my crotch) dats hair??
Me: yes. hair.
G: (pointing at my boob) whas dis, mommy? you have red on you belly?
Me: that’s mommy’s breast.
G: mommy’s bwest?
Me: yes. now go play find daddy and play with your toys. out. wrap towel around body and ushers Gavin out of the bathroom.

Any of you have any good stories of your child discovering your nakedness?

Okay…just to warn everyone, I really will be talking about the bathroom, and what folks do in the bathroom.  I know many of you are in denial about body functions (I know I was), but well, I just need to get this off my chest.  So if you’re squeamish, um, go away and check back in a day or two. 

I have a problem with some of the ladies that use the same ladies room as me at work.  We have 5 standard and 1 handicapped stall.  Now, prior to ever having children, I was like Finch from “American Pie”:  there was NO WAY that I was going to go #2 in any bathroom besides my own.  In fact, I didn’t even admit to anyone that I went poop, or had any idea of where poop came from.

But then I got pregnant, and as most of you moms know, all that fiber and such just moves through you, and with a munchkin hanging from your ribs and leaning on your bowels, there was no way I could wait several hours to go home to drop a deuce in peace and privacy.  After I had each of my kids, I realized that there was no going back to my old ways; not just because I was eating better, but also because after birthin’ two large babies, those butt muscles just aren’t what they used to be.  I’m sure I’ll need Depends by the time I’m 50.  But in the meantime, if I need to go poop while at work, I go down to the last regular stall next to the handicapped one so that I’m the farthest from the common areas of the bathroom (sinks, towels, door).  It never fails, though, that someone will come into the bathroom, where I am the only patron and will go into the stall right next to me.  Yes, they will pass up some three perfectly good, possibly less odorous, stalls just to do their own business next to me.  I have NEVER worked in a building or been in any other public bathroom setting where when there’s only a few ladies in a  large bathroom that they go in adjacent stalls unless they’re friends going there together.I also love when a lady is leaving the restroom and instead of just opening the doors and leaving nicely, they use the handicapped button to automatically open and HOLD OPEN both doors.  No one walking by would see anything besides women at the sink, but it still BUGS me to no end.What doesn’t bug me is NOT using the crinkly sani-seat covers.  I never mastered those things, and when I found out that I was a trillion times more likely to pick up some nasty disease from the handle/lock of the stall door than from the seat, I gave up on them.  However…weird, lazy-need-to-use-the-handicapped-doors girl once gave me a look for not grabbing a sani-seat cover on my way into a stall.  Conversely, each of the women I caught crowding my pooping space did not use a sani-seat cover, either.

Thankfully, any lady I’ve encountered in the washroom has washed her hands, which I guess is the really important thing.

I totally have been up to my elbows in poop. Literally. Cooper has had a long-drawn-out case of the ‘rhea. About 2 1/2 weeks to be exact. So I’ve had to fill up four stool sample cups with his poop. His watery poop. He wasn’t real keen on me taping any of the cups to his butt, so instead I’ve had to harvest it from his inside-out diapers (because that’s less absorbent and so much more fun and messy!). So my apologies to 31 for 21 for stinkin’ like poop. To make up for missing out on a posting yesterday, please view the following video that pretty much sums up what each of my cats does to me nearly every night.