No One Told Me Parenting Is Just Cleaning Up Poop

cartoon poop

Poop. There is poop everywhere.

My 3-year-old calls to me from the bathroom. “Mom! Mom!” she shrieks. I rush to her. Surely my panic attack has come true and she’s fallen in the tub and gotten stuck down the drain. Instead I find her standing naked next to a toilet bowl filled with what can only be described as butt ceviche. “Ta-dah!” she hoots, jazz-fingering toward the bowl. She is the Liza Minnelli of craps.

My baby loves to take off her diaper after she poops in it. She can say the word “poop” and sign “diaper,” but chooses never to do either of these things. Instead I hear that terrifying ripping sound of diaper adhesive coming from the living room while I’m bent over the stove attempting to be Pinterest-y. Soon I am picking up poop chunks off the floor, while shouting at her not to step in them. There are so many places for her to walk and yet she just wants to be all up in that poop. The 3-year-old comes running in because her destiny is also to torture me by coming THISCLOSE to stepping in poop while singing Frozen songs. I end up washing their feet in tub. We eat fish sticks for dinner. I am so f*cking sick of Frozen.

When the baby does poop in her diaper they are huge – softball-sized or flattened like a pancake grilled on her little butt skillet. I shake the diapers over the toilet violently to get the poop into the bowl. Most of the time the water splashes onto my hands as they plop in. I used to gag and scrub myself. Now I barely flinch. Sometimes I forget to wash my hands.

Did you know those diaper pails don’t work? No one tells you this when you’re dropping fifty dollars on what is essentially a plastic bucket with a cheap air freshener glued inside. I spent hours trying to figure out exactly how to hang those fancy garbage bags from the inside of the diaper bin, only to discover it doesn’t matter. In a few days the house will reek of rotting poops and when I finally remove the bag from the trash can the smell is so overwhelming that I barf a little bit of my breakfast up in my mouth.

There is a hierarchy of baby poops. Some are better than others. The breast milk ones are mild smelling but the consistency of sunscreen and get everywhere: up the baby’s back, down the legs, on her stomach.The formula ones just smell bizarre, like the poops of an alien. The solid food poops – forget it. You’ve now crossed over into MY TINY CHILD TAKES MAN-SIZE POOPS WTF IS HAPPENING territory and you will never go back. Parents of newborns: cherish those runny sh*ts. You will miss them when they’re gone.

We go through so many wipes. (I’ve started using wipes.)

The 3-year-old wipes herself when she poops but doesn’t know how to “get all up in there,” which is unfortunate because then her butt stinks and I’m left using the pretty cream-colored wash clothes my aunt got us off our wedding registry to dig poop residue out of her butt crack at bath time.

For a long time I was very smug because my kid had yet to poop in the tub. Then my kid pooped in the tub.

The moment your kid poops in her potty is the greatest moment of your parenting life. It’s followed by the worst moment: trying to get a giant, sticky crap out of the potty and into the toilet and then washing the whole thing.

I went in to the nursery recently to retrieve the baby from her nap. She was standing in her crib, shorts off, diaper in hand. She was surrounded by and covered with poop balls, the tiny hard ones that look like someone molded them out of crap-colored play-dough. In the crib, on the floor, on her clothes. IN HER HAIR. There was a poop ball stuck in her god damn hair. I yelled for my husband and we scoured the floor with a flash light and then he held her as I snipped the poop out of her hair.

There was poop in her hair, guys.

Everything I need to know about my kids I learn from their bowel movements. I can tell you what they’ve eaten, how they’re feeling, what their mood is – just from their poops. Poops are a crystal ball into your kids’ psyche. I spend a lot of time staring at them, trying to decipher their secrets.

I knew parenting would be messy, dirty, even feral at times. I still didn’t realize how much of it would be spent getting intimate with the terrible things that come out of my kids’ adorable butts. The poop is relentless. It never stops. It is big and small and hard and soft and all the colors of the rainbow. Have you ever seen a light grey poop? A blue poop? How about orange? Green? A RED POOP? My kids’s asses are like an effing Skittles commercial. On good days, on bad days, on days when you just want to pass out – there is poop. I just wish someone had told me about all the poop.

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