It was a sunny, late spring afternoon in the suburbs of Kansas City. I'd spent the whole morning enjoying the use of my MBA on my two-year-old twins. They were a lively pair, Em and Nate, and at lunchtime had snarfed down a yummy meal of Gerber peas and some orange-looking meat. Back that up with some juice, and they were good to go.
In more ways than one.
The little sweeties were housed in one room at the time, with each crib on a wall perpendicular to each other. (Ironically, the walls were a fishy and starfish theme.) Nap time was always a bit of a fight; on this day, it was worse than normal. Four rounds of Guess How Much I Love You? and many other books didn't help. The natives were still restless. Lights out and Mommy lying on the floor didn't help, either. Lying them down would cause a spring-back effect, like a cocktail flu after way too many margaritas. There seemed to be no sleepiness happening today. They were jumping in their cribs, laughing and giggling a continual jungle chant like no other.
Frustrated, I thought leaving them alone would calm them down. Meanwhile, I would finally take my shower for the day. A quick shower. They were caged safely away in their cribs, right? What harm could they do? What harm could come to them? I'm a good Mommy. I am! It was the fastest of showers. I promise! I swear! Ten minutes, tops!
Still wet, still naked under my towel, I padded across the hall from my room to theirs. I can hear them talking their baby gibberish and still jumping. As I open the door, I yell, "You guys! Settle d-- OH MY GAWD! What did you doooo?!?"
Here's the scene: every stuffed animal, every sheet, every blanket, and both mattress pads were on the floor in heaps. Emma was completely naked. Shirt, shorts, diaper on the floor. Nate was naked from the waist down. (He couldn't get his shirt off from over his Charlie Brown head.) His shorts and diaper were on the floor, too. Nate had peed all over every inch of each of the piles in front of his crib. In pure male fashion, I'm sure, he wrote his name in cursive in the snowy mounds of absorbent bedding below.
Emma, however, didn't stop there. In her nakedness, she held up her hand, showing me something. I walked closer. There was a streak of something brown across her cheek. There was brown in her angelic blonde, curly hair. I grabbed her wrist and looked. Yes, poop all over her hand.
Now I looked more closely at her surroundings. There was poop on the mattress. There was poop on the crib rails. And there were finger-painted lines of poop smeared along the starfish-painted walls. There was nothing left to wipe her hands on -- everything material was all on the floor. A turn-around check confirms -- yes, you guessed it -- a butt blobbed with poo. She had pooped before taking off her diaper; the far-flung diaper, of course (butt of course!), landed poop-side-down on the bedding below.
She whinnied and pointed to her bottom, as if to say, "Ehhh, get it off me!"
It takes no stretch of the imagination to see that my sunny suburban afternoon (the one hour of "me time" in the day) was gone. No nap of my own. No time to poop on my own without double trouble banging on the door. Nothing.
Many corn-filled baby wipes (compliments of last nights dinner), several laundry loads of yellow- and Shout-soaked brown-stained items, and the not-so-small task of double-dipping two small children in the tub meant that my day was down the toilet. When my husband came home from work, I handed the cranky non-napped poop machines to him promptly. (A phone call earlier prepared him for this.) "Here! See ya!" I went out for margaritas with a fellow twin-mom.
I counted my blessings: only one pooper-scooper that day. The starfish came clean. (All of 'em.) And the mattresses were plastic. My only regret? In hindsight, I really wish I had remembered the camcorder.
