Super pooper

Every parent has a poop story, some of us several of them. My wife’s involves Bub projectiling on her from a good four feet away at the hospital. Impressive, my boy. Most impressive.

Not to be outdone, here comes the HP! To set the scene, she was merely swinging relatively peacefully, but she wasn’t sleeping, which I found slightly unusual. She was fidgeting a little bit, so I thought, hmmm, maybe she needs to be changed. She likes the changing table, so why not? It’ll be fun.

On the way to the changing table, I noticed something on her onesie, just above her pants. Looked like pizza sauce. We’d had pizza for lunch, it made sense. Wait a minute, she didn’t have pizza; she doesn’t even have teeth. Well, maybe I just wiped my hands on her, no biggie. Sometimes you run out of napkins. But it didn’t smell like pizza sauce, it smelled like something from my childhood, though I couldn’t quite place it.

I took her pants off, unsnapped her onesie and could see the familiar brown outline in the diaper. But then as I pulled onesie out of the way, I discovered the poop to actually be leaking out the TOP. This explained the pizza sauce, in a really unfortunate manner.

Now this wasn’t my first explosive diaper rodeo, still it’s hard when the pressure is on. This is the list of solutions I came up with, in the heat of the moment: 1. Deposit her straight into the tub. 2. Save it for mommy! 3. Hose her off in the sink. 4. Call 911.

In the end, after all the strategizing, I just decided to hold my breath and dive in. I opened the diaper and splat! Left foot straight into it. Hers, not mine. Okay, good start! Worry about that later, just press on. I got her legs up and wiped her rear and back off so I could set her down. Forgot about that poop on her foot somehow, which now artistically adorned my hand. Wipe that, wipe the foot, steady the ship.

I took a handful of wipes and made sweeping passes at the orangish goo. Hey, my favorite color is orange. Was, anyway. I used her now-defiled onesie for a dry pass. She was like one of those oil-spill cranes I was desperately trying to save with love and detergent.

The first direct assault was now complete, with minimal casualties. I surveyed the battle site, looking for errant poop splinter cells hiding in the crevasses. As I eradicated the holdouts from between her toes and out of her belly button, she smiled at me, blissfully ignorant. Good job, Daddy, she said. I tried to tell you it wasn’t pizza sauce.