Freedom, peas, and unity

Oh sweet jesus. I'm sitting here inhaling a chocolate bar, trying to recover as I write this. Let me tell you a true story....

My aunt recently visited, and she pointed out how we usually only document the good stuff in our lives, especially with our children. We all get to look at the pictures and shriek, "How cute! He's ______!" But what we don't get to see is the other side, the gross stuff, the sad or stressful stuff, the moments when the kid is crying and won't stop or puking down my shirt or I've just set him down in Playstation C and walked out of the house to keep from punching him in the face.

So I thought it would be cool to take  a picture or a video every hour on the hour, so you could see all of it, in a way, and not just the carefully selected cutest photos of the day. 

This morning I decided to do it, but promptly forgot because, well, I've got a thousand other things on my mind like getting out of the house on time with my teeth brushed and him dressed.

Well, my friends, I sure wish I had, because today was a day like no other.

It was going fine until our lunch. We sat down to enjoy a tasty pizza (for me) and a bowl of mashed peas (for him). He sure loves mashed peas. Pretty soon he can't get the peas in fast enough and he's freaking out and covered in peas, so I pick him up, careful to hold him away from my body so we won't both need baths. I like my outfit today and do not want peas on it.

I take him, my lunch, and my book of short stories into the bathroom (I can juggle!) and run a bath in his whale tub. I plop him in, hand him his hippo and finish my lunch sitting on the bathroom floor while he splashes around. Then suddenly, he squawks. Squawks again. "Hey!" he says in Baby Language, "Hey! Ma! Get me out of here! It stinks!"

I reach in to pull him out and... the water looks kind of... muddy? It smells kind of... um... oh sweet baby jesus, he shit in the tub.

Now, I don't know about you, but I thought when this happened (because with kids it's not if, it's when) I'd... well, I don't know what I thought, but I basically figured it'd be no big deal. Nuh uh. Baby poop is the consistency of those green mud face masks. Thick, sludgy, stuff that sticks to things like a crazed co-dependent. I haul The Beast up out of the bath, his body studded with little green poop-jewels, flip the baby tub over to drain, turn the faucet back on to rinse him, flip the tub back over and then stop. Both the baby tub and the people tub are covered in green sludge. Where do I put him? I panic. We have two sinks in our bathroom, so after wiping the rest of the poop out of his butt (try doing this with a slippery, excrement-covered, twenty pound baby in one arm and a manic determination not to get your outfit dirty--crazy making!), I turn one sink on and dump soap in, put him in there and splash him around. I pull him out and transfer him to sink number two to rinse him off, because it is now apparent I was a little overeager with the soap. Our eyes watering from the heady stank of baby feces, I haul him out and wrap him in a towel and sprint out of the bathroom. 

My dining room is splattered with peas. My bathroom is covered in poop. The baby's crying because now he's hungry, and I have a sporadic feces phobia that has now reared it's ugly head and I'm spinning in circles because I'm SURE there's crap somewhere on my body and I'm sniffing his hands terrified it's stuck to him and he'll chew his fingers and DIE from poop poisoning.

All this before noon. Some of you reading this aren't even awake by then.