Thursday, September 15, 2011

turns out my week has been about bodily functions. sorry about that.

Oh ya'll. I've had several moments this week that I've already told you in my head. Entire blog posts, written and forgotten, driving down the road. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does that. But it's kind of been a memorable week. Emmy has hit that stage in babyhood where the dog food bowl and the toilet are the most fascinating spots imaginable. Anybody need a bajillion baby toys? Emmy doesn't. She has a dinosaur and her brothers' Crocs to chew.

Alas.

Silas is also ... well, he's Silas. Boisterous seems euphemistic. He can smell opportunity, and when I'm fishing a page of a book out of Emmy's mouth - again - Silas intuitively knows that he has an 8 second head start on me if he were to bolt out of the front door right then. For every child I am tending, two more are on the loose. Asher, thankfully, is largely predictable, and for that I am immensely thankful. The other two? Not so much.

Which is to say, by bedtime I'm exhausted. I remember now how I lost the baby weight the first time around - I never ate, and I never sat down. I'm falling into the same pattern again. I actually have felt ill because I have forgotten to eat and drink enough recently, so I have started eating Clif bars in the afternoons, and have been surprised at how much they help with my energy level. When food marketed as fuel for kayakers and backpackers is a fitting mid-afternoon snack, you know your days are full.

So. Enough about being busy and tired - you all are, too - I said I had some noteworthy moments to share. Let's see now if I can remember them.

Well ... there was Wednesday morning, when I put the kids in the van, then made four - count them, four - trips back into the house for forgotten shoes and sippee cups and whatnot. By the time I had all of our supplies in the car, Silas had wet his pants. By the time I got him cleaned up, the boys were too late for carpool and I had to unload the whole crew to take them in. By the time we were finished with all of THAT, Emmy and I only had a few minutes to kill before meeting Asher's class (for a field trip to the animal hospital), so we went to Starbucks. I changed her before we went in, and clearly was not paying attention to what I was doing, because while in line there was a total diaper malfunction and my baby girl peed all OVER me. Here I stand, waiting for my bagel and water (because you know I didn't have time for breakfast before we left - see above), with a dripping baby on my hip. I got her cleaned up, but I didn't have a change of clothes for myself (that would have taken a fifth trip into the house) and didn't have time to make it back home before meeting his class.

So I did what any mother of many small children would have done. I put the baby in the sling, and hid it.

What's a little baby pee anyway, right?

Equally memorable ... this afternoon, after a faux nap time, I took the children out to play There's a church/ school with a great playground nearby. The boys were playing superheroes, when Silas started looking a little ... suspicious. "You go away," he told Asher, "or you might smell my poop." Nice. Thankfully he had on a pull-up (don't judge - I know I can't both complain about potty training and put him in pull-ups. This is me, doing it anyway), but I had no wipes (wipes would have taken a sixth trip). Ya'll. This was a diaper of such magnitude that there was nothing to be done but to strip him down and hose him off using the spigot behind the church. Spraying poo off of my son in a random church parking lot - here is a moment I could never have imagined before having children. What else could I do? Thankfully I did have an extra outfit in the car, so once he was bathed and dressed, he was good to go. All's well that ends well, right?

What a week.

3 comments:

Kendra said...

Laughing out loud!

And crying a little inside...oh the days to come.

I read a perfect line the other day - which I will now butcher- about how simply preserving young children throughout the day is the most exhausting of tasks. So true.

Heather said...

I was just considering adding a protein bar of some sort to my afternoons. I will try the cliff brand then.

Lisa said...

I started babysitting around the time Olivia hit that "Wait until Momma's distracted then make a mad dash for the back door" stage. It didn't take her two seconds to have the front OR back door open and be halfway down the block before I realized anything had happened. So, around that time, we installed a bunch of those hotel-style chain locks...up high where the kids couldn't reach them. They are ugly, but they work like a charm at keeping the children IN the house.

All I could do was laugh at the hosing-down-Silas story. We need an emergency bag for the car...just when you think you are past that sort of thing, it is going to happen.