Dirty Like This

When we first moved into this house, we debated about ripping the carpets up and finishing the hardwood floors.  I knew they were diamonds in the rough.  I wanted to do it — really, really wanted to do it — but everyone else was against it.  M thought we didn’t have the money to spend (and, to be fair, he was right).  My dad couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to “just move into the house and enjoy it, as he would.  And my mum was adamant that hardwood floors are so much harder to keep clean than carpet (but the truth is she just doesn’t much like hardwood).

In the end, I listened to none of them, and I have never regretted it for a minute.  Not only because they are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.  And not only because I realised with hindsight that, with her allergies and asthma, E2 probably would have suffered a lot more with carpet in her room than she is with that nice clean hardwood.  And not only because there were quite notable decreases in M’s migraine and sinus problems first when we moved to the States and changed to forced air heat, and then yet again when we moved to this house with its hardwood throughout.

No… no… not just for all those reasons.  No, I was so glad that I had decided to go ahead and rip out the carpets, to listen to my gut and get the hardwood finished all though the house…  I was so glad today, as I followed a little trail from one room of the house to another…  A little trail of neat little brown plops of poo — one every few feet — which led me through three rooms and finally ended at a pair sagging, straining training pants, filled way beyond their capacity, employed far beyond their remit, by a little girl who had completely forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a nappy and is now supposed to use the toilet instead.

I lifted her in one swift motion and deposited her — clothes, socks, training pants, and all — straight into the bathtub, and ran downstairs to quickly collect the plops before someone else unknowingly squished them underfoot.  And, as I gathered them up easily with a damp cloth and some disinfectant — to the panicked howls of  “But Mummy I am still wearing my clothes!!!” — I thought back to my mum’s argument…

When she said carpet was easier to keep clean, she was never imagining this.

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That’s No Moon…

But the thing with your daughters finally getting to eat cake — and your mother realising that she can be the source of this new joy to her granddaughters and so embracing the opportunity to make sure there is cake to be had every single day — is that you get used to them running around with chocolate crumbs all round their mouths.

So even though I did realise, after a few days of this chocolate-covered mayhem, that it isn’t necessary for them to have cake every day and I did ask my mum to perhaps scale it back a bit, it’s still been common enough to see those choccy-smiles gazing back at me.

And so I didn’t give it a thought the other day when E2 came running up with chocolate icing spread all over her face, covering her teeth, a bit streaked in her hair, and the ends of several fingers coated in the stuff and spreading it in little clumps on everything she touched.  Part of me sighed at the inevitable (and unenviable) clean-up job ahead, but there was another part of me — the part that worried so when she stopped gaining weight, the part that was so afraid when she dropped from the 98th percentile to the 1st percentile, the part that has struggled every day for the past year with her incredible dietary restrictions — that was just so happy to see her eating and enjoying and just being a regular kid.  It may not seem like much, but it is.  Oh, it is.  And I put aside all my healthy-food fanaticism to just soak up the joy of seeing my kid covered in chocolate-y goodness.

Until I remembered that I hadn’t given her any cake that day…  And then she turned around and toddled off, and I spotted ther was more chocolate — much more than was ever on her face or hair or hands — coming out of her nappy and spread down one leg.

And I realised, with sudden horror, that it was not chocolate.  And the clean up was a completely different job than I had thought…

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I’m Broody, Yes, But I Still Appreciate a Little Help

With every passing day, as E2 gets older, the changes in her are coming rapidly.  Though I still think she is my baby, she is really nothing of the sort.  And the more I realise that, the more I find myself longing for another baby.  My third…  my last…  just one more…  The feeling is so strong, so urgent!  But M is adamant — there will be no more babies.  So instead of clinging ever more desperately to her baby-ness, even as it slips away day by day, I try instead to rejoice in the competent little person she is becoming.

When she woke me at 4am last night — for the third time, mind — and I stumbled groggily into her room, she stood up in her cot and, pointing to her bum, said, “Oh noooo!  Poooooo!”  And then, for emphasis, trumpeted loudly.

And though it meant I had to carry her into the other room and turn on the rude lights, and stand there in the middle of the night wearing only the top half of my PJs and change a very stinky nappy, I had to smile.  Because newborn babies, for all their rosebud-lipped lovliness, don’t point to their bums and tell you they’ve done a poo.  And at 4am, when I can barely open my eyes enough to walk in a straight line, I do appreciate that she can now give me really big clues like that.

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The Murderous Mummy Poo

Warning: this story contains direct references to poo.

E1 did a big poo in her potty yesterday. As I bent down to wipe her bum, I could see that it was composed of some small pellet-like poos at the bottom, followed by a huge big cow-patty of a poo sitting on top.  In our world, this is a very good thing and deserving of high praise.

Before I had a chance to say anything, E1 piped up, “Mummy, I had a lot of baby poos!”  Yes.  “And then a big mummy poo!” Yes. I told her it was a fabulous poo.

“And Mummy…” Yes? “The mummy poo is squishing the baby poos, and the baby poos are crying!”

There was a over-analytical part of me that felt I should evaluate this. Why is my daughter assigning such detailed personification to her bowel movements? And what could possibly be the source of this rather disturbing idea of a mother squishing her children?  But it was over-ruled by the part of me that was trying desperately not to laugh out loud, stop my shoulders shaking uncontrollably, and thinking, “Just wait until I tell her daddy about this one…!”

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Gratitude 38, I Don’t Need Much

Today I am grateful for:

1. A bit of cool –  In England, a day like today would have people complaining about the oppressive heat and the papers warning of OAPs dropping like flies but, here, after the really hot days we’ve had, today’s middling heat felt incredibly refreshing.
2. A bit of rest — today M gave me the chance to lie in today to try to beat this virus we’ve all come down with over the weekend.  It’s given us all runny noses, sore throats, and that tiredness you get in your chests.  I’m glad it came on at the weekend instead of during the week, and I am hopeful that a restful day might have helped to send it on its way.
3. A bit of respite from the poo disasters!  After the run we’ve had lately, that’s all I really need to keep me happy!

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Gratitude 38, Saturday Help

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that it is Saturday, which means that I was not on my own today taking care of the girls after getting a scant few hours of tortuously broken sleep last night. Both girls have something that’s making their noses run and giving them sore throats (and me a bit too). They haven’t been breathing well at night — and when they don’t breathe, they don’t sleep. And when they don’t sleep, I don’t sleep. Between them, I didn’t get to bed last night until 2.30am, and then E2 had me up five times after that, before I finally got up at 9.30. I have been a zombie today.
2. The fact that it is Saturday, which means that M was here when E1 had a massive poo during her nap which rose up and out of her nappy and went everywhere. And he was here when I went in to get E2 and discovered that she’d taken off her clothes and found a poo in her nappy and spread it all over her cot, her sheets, and herself. She must have been playing in it a good while before I discovered her because it had dried and was an absolute devil to get off. I plucked her out of the crib and delivered her to her daddy, who deposited her straight into the bath next to her sister, and then I spent a full half-an-hour scrubbing that crib. And he was here when, about 2 hours later, she did exactly the same thing in the playroom. I was in the other room and heard M suddenly bellowing as he carried her to bath again, yelling, “Keep E1 away! And clean that up, will you?!?” This is the fourth time she’s done this now — and it’s not big and it’s not clever. I really need to figure out a way of thwarting her nudist, poo-discovering tendencies. Duct-tape on her nappy…?
3. The fact that it is Saturday and so, after an exhausting night and very trying day, M went off to the pub for a few hours after we’d got the girls in bed, and I stayed home to hold the fort. And even though I didn’t get to go with him, it made me feel really quite content for him to pop out for a drink. It felt familiar… normal… It felt just right.

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Gratitude 29, Panic and Screaming

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that when E2 choked on a piece of mango today, and my world slowed to a crawl as I realised that the wide-eyed, guppy-mouthing look of utter panic on her face was because she was desperately trying to draw in air that was not getting through, and I saw my arms reach out to grab her (Please God, please God, please God, just let it be sitting over the top of her windpipe and not be lodged halfway down…), and held my own rising panic in check as I threw her face-down over my knee and whacked her five times hard on her back, the mango blessedly dislodged itself and she drew a great, long breath. And, as I pulled her up and held her so tightly in to me, she let it out in an ear-shattering scream — the most wonderful sound — and my own panic broke free and I began to sob at what so nearly might have been. And, at that, E1 suddenly became frightened and rang over to me to be held and kissed, and I sat with my arms around my two, live, crying daughters and realised anew how fragile all of this really is.
2. The fact that when, later in the day, E2 tripped over her own two feet and went flying forward, and landed on her face on one the sharp corners of the heating vent, it missed her eye — only by millimeters — and left its great, raised, purple welt on her cheekbone instead.
3. The fact that when I was woken from an early evening nap by the sound of E2 screaming and M’s panicked voice yelling to E1 to “Go wake up Mummy! Go wake up Mummy now!”, and I leapt out of bed in mortal fear, I found that it was only that E2 had again managed to find her way into a poo-filled nappy, and had surprised her daddy by covering herself and everything within a 3-foot radius with the contents, and he was now spraying her down in the tub with one hand while gesticulating wildly with the other in the general direction of me, E1, and the poo, and yelling, “Can you see to that?!? And… and keep her from it! And…” Oh, is that all it is? Poo I can handle.

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Gratitude 24, The Misadventures of E2

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that when E2 fell off backwards off a kitchen chair today, and landed with a great thud flat on her back and the back of her head, and then would not stop crying and couldn’t be consoled no matter what we did, it was only because she had bitten through the back of her lip and not anything more serious than that.
2. The fact that when M went in to get her from her nap and found her as naked as the day she was born (because he’d accidentally dressed her in E1′s vest she had wriggled out of it), she’d not found another exciting poo when she took off her nappy and the worst we had to deal with this time was the huge wet patch in the middle of the mattress.
3. The fact that at the moment when she did the biggest and most stinky poo right in the middle of Mass tonight, it was M who happened to be holding her, and so there was a sort of natural assumption that it was he, rather than me, who should have to carry her out to the car where the nappy bag was and change her on one of the seats in the pouring rain.

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Gratitude 7, A Great Deal of Poo

Today I am grateful for:

1. The fact that, when E2 took off her sleepsuit before I went in to get her up this morning, and then took off her nappy and discovered there a warm and squidgy poo, and sank her hands deep into it, and spread stinking clumps of it in great thick coats over the bed rails, her bedsheets, and every inch of her body — somehow getting it even under the mattress — and then stood naked, caked in it, grinning up at me in sheer delight with a lump of poo in each clenched fist, that horrid foul stench filling the room and with brown streaks smeared all over her teeth and lips, she didn’t get sick later in the day from ingesting too much of the stuff and I didn’t get sick from having to spend half the day cleaning it all up.
2. That, when I put E2 down for her nap in the other cot (crib) which we have (but which we haven’t been using) and she managed to strip off her sleeping bag and climb over the rail and throw herself out it, falling nearly four feet and landing with a great thud and an ear-piercing yowl on the floor, she did her little uninsured self no damage.
3. That she is sleeping soundly now in a clean and completely safe cot, in a sleeping bag she cannot get herself out of, a nappy she can’t get her hands into, and we can all start afresh tomorrow as if none of this ever happened.

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