Warning: This post talks about poop. If you can't handle that, go read Pinterest posts about scrapbooks or something.
Yesterday morning I got a really sheepish call from my daughter's home-daycare provider, a really sweet woman who is not really named Nell, but for the sake of not dragging people's real lives all over the internet, totally is named Nell. She is probably the most ladylike redneck I've ever met, and it pains her to deliver bad news. Poor Nell informed me that one of the daycare's little boys, who had attended the morning before with my daughter, had strange blisters that turned out to be Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease. Not to be confused with Foot-and-Mouth, otherwise known as Mad Cow, or Foot-in-Mouth, which is what I suffer from.
Turns out HFMD is super contagious for little ones, and causes painful blisters on the aforementioned areas, but has an incubation period of a few days, so we won't actually know if anyone in our household is sick until after the weekend. We've partially quarantined ourselves and I've been cleaning like a crazy person. Today I went to Walgreens (it is literally next door to our house) to get some more cleaning supplies. This detail is important. I went there to PREVENT DISEASES AND GENERAL NASTINESS. I told Little Bean to walk, so she wouldn't get germs on the carts, and to hold my hand and try not to touch anything. She mostly complied, because she's sweet and obedient and I don't know where she gets that from. But then, sometime after the awkward transvestite in Aisle 2 and immediately before heading to checkout, my beautiful precious princess shat her pants.
I should have listened to my inner Mommy Instincts, which told me to just leave her saggy britches on her, check out my small basket of supplies in a hurry, and walk her across the parking lot to our home, where I could clean her up properly and change her clothes. But then my Other People's Opinions Voice told me that was a weird and disgusting idea and that everyone would TOTALLY SMELL the poop and it would be awful. So like many young moms with only one kid, I allowed my sense of Other People and Their Opinions to make me do a stupid thing. I took Little Bean to the restroom and tried to clean her up.
Do you remember that game Operation? In which you had to use tweezers to carefully remove the organs of your plastic patient without touching the sides of their compartments, lest you set off an alarm? Let's ignore the part about how it's basically a training game for organ harvesting, and focus on the part about how hard it was to keep the tweezers from bumping the side. That's the game I played today--with poop. And I lost.It ended up on her legs, her hands, the floor, the stall door, the toilet, her shoes, and every item of clothing except her pants.
After thirty feet of paper towels and a lot of effort to be nice ("NO!! I mean, no, Sweetie. When I said you can't sit naked on the public restroom floor, I also meant, please don't hop on all fours and be a naked bunny on the public restroom floor"), I finally headed to check out. The cashier assured me that they wouldn't mind sanitizing the restroom again. She put me at ease with a story of her twins simultaneously playing in the fireplace ashes and the toilet. People are really nice sometimes, you know? I DID neglect to mention that my child might be starting some kind of an epidemic, but I did what I could and if somebody yelled at me then I would have burst into tears.
So I got Little Bean home and in the tub, and we both felt a lot better. Eventually I got her down for a nap, and I realized I was starving. I had some delicious soup that was calling my name. But apparently my can opener has rusted to the point of not functioning. Although my ox of a husband could have forced it to work, he was exasperated by some sort of work-related disaster and practically growled at me for asking. So I used my lame can opener to punch holes all the way around the can until the top was barely hanging on, and pushed down. At this point I once again got a little nudge from my instinct, which said: that is going to spray you in the face. I ignored it because my hands were already completing the motion. Guess what? It sprayed me in the face. There was bean soup in my hair. There was bean soup in my left ear. There was bean soup in my bra. There was bean soup in my shoes. Did I mention it was in my ear?
The moral of this very longwinded story: just trust yourself. I mean, check yourself every now and again. Take your meds. I do. But it seems like most of these worst-day-ever stories from my life occur after I have doubted myself, and most of my gratifying successes come after I listen to my instincts and stick to my beliefs.
