Poopiest Post Ever

While I finished my breakfast yesterday, Abbie was nice enough to play quietly in her room, destroying nothing except the binding on one of her oldest books. As always, I checked her diaper immediately after breakfast; that’s prime pooping time. Usually I need to bend down for a closer sniff and possibly a visual inspection to check her diaper, but this time I could tell the diaper was full immediately upon entering her room. The smell wasn’t the dead giveaway since keeping her diaper pail behind a closed door for hours every day is enough to give the entire room the perpetually permeating odor of poop. The obvious sign that her diaper was full was the poop overflowing up and out of the diaper’s backside.

I cringed a bit, realizing that when poop smears itself that far up the backside, it creates a horribly difficult mess to clean. The more it spreads asunder, the more wipes that must be used down under. I picked her up, careful not to touch the diaper area and smear its contents even more, and set her on the changing table. I opened the diaper, and discovered that not only was poop smeared up the backside, but up the front side as well; in short, it was her Biggest Poop Ever. I lifted her feet to limit the effectiveness of her squirming, and started wiping. This could have been an important math teaching moment had I counted as I used one wipe, two wipes, three wipes, and more, but the poop remained. Eventually, the struggling reached a pitch where I surrendered and let her legs go. Her thrashings contaminated every appendage with poop, and managed to smear the (thankfully washable) changing pad a light brown. Even the wall collected a few strokes before I successfully wiped her into an acceptably poop-free state. I then missed another important math teaching moment as I washed my hands once, twice, three times, and more.

Experiencing Abbie’s Biggest Poop Ever first thing in the morning could have been a bad omen for the rest of the day, but her attitude was fairly decent for the rest of the day, especially when I set her down for her nap. Not only did she fall asleep with minimal fussing, but also she napped for a long time, almost four hours, producing her (dare I say it?) Longest Nap Ever. She gave me so much free time, I could have added a supplemental nap to my standard one nap a day routine. Not that I did anything so smart; instead I wasted the afternoon checking third-tier internet sites, the kind of sites I would check back in college when I thought having class for upwards of three hours a day, some starting as early as 8am, constituted a crushing schedule.

Of course, yesterday was a rare day when we didn’t want her to nap for as long as possible. Ellie, enjoying her monthly “free day,” which is defined as a day when she only has to work at the hospital in the morning, and wanted to spend it registering for gifts for the twins. Registration is a separate story that may or may not appear in a future post, but I can condense the experience by saying you would think that Abbie, fresh off a four-hour nap, would be in a good mood for the process, completely refreshed with boundless energy, but you would be wrong. She whined horribly throughout the entire process even though we gave her a pen to chew on for entertainment. She wanted the scanning gun used to register, but we adamantly refused because it was probably an expensive piece of equipment that she could easily pulverize with her “Chew ‘N Toss” style of play. Plus I wanted to play with it and shoot bar codes.

We survived her whining and returned home in plenty of time to prepare her for bed. We had even more time to prepare her for bed when it turned out she was wide awake despite the late hour, much less sleepy than the average Kansas City Royals spectator. A four-hour nap will do that to a toddler. I let her stay awake much too long, not quite to her Latest Bedtime Ever, but at least within whining distance. With the late bedtime, I thought her sleep pattern would even out overnight and she would wake up at her normal time, but she remained a little off-kilter by waking up about 20 minutes early in the morning. Things are returning to normal, but I’m still dealing with the aftermath of her Longest Nap Ever. Fortunately, the aftermath of her Biggest Poop Ever is safely contained in her diaper pail.