You guys, it happened. It finally happened. We have our poop story – THE poop story, the one that we will be telling and re-telling, providing Olive residual embarrassment for years, perhaps decades to come.
We all have one of these right? It’s not just my parents that have inflicted this unique sort of humiliation upon me? My poop story is the time that my mother came to get me after a nap, only to find that I had smeared the contents of my diaper all over my blankets, my crib, and myself.
This story has been told dozens of times and like the best tall tales, each time the story gets told there is more poop and more surfaces covered with poop, it gets exaggerated and multiplied and everyone has a good laugh at good ole poopy baby Madeleine.
WELL. Today is a monumental day, because now our Olive has a story of her own (where’s the spot in the baby book for that?)
It begins with me reminding you that babies can’t do anything for themselves. Including passing gas (is it indelicate to say “fart”? I have to say something other than “passing gas”, I’m not an elderly dowager. Is “toot” too cutesy? Whatever, we’re talking about baby farts toots here. TOOTS it is!)
Anyway, you have to help them toot, too. So there I was, changing our dear Miss Olive, when she starts grunting and kicking in that telltale ‘I’m full of toots, please help me mama!” way.
She’s a very cute baby, as I’m sure you have noticed, so I was looking deep into her gorgeous eyes and cooing at her, laughing at her funny facial expressions as I bicycled her legs and touched her toes to her nose, trying to release some of those pent up toots.
This is probably a good time to also remind you about the time I told you that sometimes babies don’t poop for many days. Remember that? Yeah. They don’t poop for a bunch of days and then suddenly they poop eighteen days worth all at once in a massive poopsplosion. I think I compared it to a jack-in-the-box. But with poop.
Do you see where this is going? Is that enough heavy-handed foreshadowing for you? If you see what’s coming, you are smarter than I was.
I was getting quite a few toots while I was contorting her, and I would be lying if I said that it wasn’t making me extremely proud. I mean, it was like, ” Look at me! I have mastered the problem of the Gassy Baby! I am supermom!”
Each fresh expulsion was like a little trumpet heralding my superior mothering abilities, my extreme competence.
And then friends, I bent her in half one last time and she let out a particularly intense sort of grunty squeak, and I happened to look down and there it was. The Poop.
I’m sorry to be so crude, but there’s really no other way to say this: she was sharting.
I didn’t know what to do, I mean she hadn’t done anything but pee in like five days so I didn’t want to jeopardize the situation but at the same time, she was just sharting all over the change table. My supreme mother confidence disappeared and, paralyzed by indecision, I just kept holding her legs by her head and she kept pooping and it was going on and on and on with no end in sight and so desperately I started yelling “Help! Adam! Help!”
Adam came whipping upstairs, probably expecting to see us in danger or in pain or both, but instead what he saw was his wife holding the legs of his infant daughter while poop flowed out of her like some sort of bizarre softserve machine gone horribly, horribly wrong.
He ran into the room and then we both started panicking and yelling things like “Wipes!” and “Grab her feet!” and “It’s everywhere!”. As we were yelling and panicking, she just kept going. Pooping. At one point Adam took her legs from me so I could grab some wipes and during the hand-off her body position was shifted diagonally which moved her hand within reaching distance of the mess she had created.
As I struggled to contain the poop with a series of wipes, she smacked one little hand into the rapidly-forming pile and it splattered, and then she started waving it around and trying to grab onto Adam’s arm.
“It’s touching me! She’s touching me with her poop hand! Stop touching me!”, Adam started shrieking, trying to get away from her, but he was still holding onto her legs so he couldn’t get out of her reach and at this point I was standing there with a fistful of wipes, doubled over with laughter and shaking so hard I could hardly see.
“Help me!” Adam was pleading, “She’s touching me!”
And Internets, she just kept pooping.
My god there was SO. MUCH. Looking back I’m strangely proud of her – where was she hiding it all?
And throughout this whole episode she had this huge gummy grin, like her inexperienced parents rushing around panicked and covered in feces was the funniest thing in the world. And my god, she was right.
She was right.
So there you have it. Olive’s Poop Story. She did us proud.
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