Poop (what else?)
You've heard of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. My kids are the children of forty poops. Actually, make that fifty. Have I ever mentioned that they're allergic to pretty much everything edible? And though, thankfully, they don't have the life-threatening kind of allergies, I still seem to have a really hard time getting their diets totally allergy-free. Everything from having a little butter that is baked into a cookie, to being fed goldfish crackers by the well-meaning ladies in Sunday School. Anyways, lately their digestive systems have been all out of whack, making traveling a little difficult.
On Friday we did our day-long doctor's appointment and shopping trip, and I stupidly declined Chinua's offer to keep the kids with him, thinking, "I can do it!" I should have added, "although I will feel like jumping in front of a moving vehicle by the end of the day."
The YaYa Sister, my twenty-month-old, literally pooped in her diaper at every stop we made. I kept thinking there couldn't possibly be any more poop, but it kept coming, and I kept changing the diapers in the back of the station wagon. I even told her, at one point, that she was going to be grounded if she pooped one more time, but she didn't listen to me, so I've taken away her driving privileges.
Kid A, the three-year-old, on the other hand, is potty-trained, so that means that we get to run to the bathroom thirty-six times in one day. The third time that he had to pee in Target I seriously looked around for some sort of ceramic container or something. Just pee in here, son, no one will even know, at least, for a few days... I guess it comes from my bad habit of letting him pee on trees when we're far from any bathroom at the Land. No, I wouldn't really let him pee in a container in Target. I got in enough trouble for letting him ride on the back of the shopping cart. (I thought that was just normal. Didn't everyone ride on the back of the cart when they were kids?) It was a crazy day. It didn't help that the whole time I was thinking, I should have just left them at home. It also didn't help that we almost got run over in the parking lot, or that one of the times we were in the bathroom, some store employee took our cart and PUT EVERYTHING BACK. I must have been a perfect picture of the frazzled mom, eight months pregnant with two small kids, running back and forth to the toilet all day long. Oh my aching back.
Anyways, it is days later and the poop has not let up. Or, it has a little bit, I guess, but I'm still waiting for a nice one-poop day out of either of them.
We're in San Francisco right now, and we went to a wonderful Christmas party last night, and Kid A won his first prize ever, in the Gingerbread Man decorating contest. He was so thrilled, so overcome with pride and happiness and the glory of having everyone clap for him. I've never seen him like that before and my heart nearly broke with love. He didn't even mind that there were seventeen prizes given out. And he didn't even mind that the category he placed first in was Most Hospitalized-Looking. Actually, I'm pretty sure that he didn't know what it meant. All he knew was that lots of people were clapping and cheering and that was HIS man cookie.
We've been having a good time, visiting with friends and running around doing a little bit of Christmas shopping in the City. We've seen many bathrooms. (Are you done yet, Kid A? Nope. Are you done now, Bud? No. I'm making dolphin sounds. That's great, but are you done pooping? No!) and worn our right feet off. YaYa has lost her mind from time to time and bullied Kid A relentlessly. Today in the car he explained it for us: "She didn't have her nap, Mom. When she doesn't have her nap she's always mad at me." Chinua and I have snapped at each other for no reason at all other than pure exhaustion, and then apologized five seconds later-- a few times. We're having lots of fun, too, and laughing a lot at the things Kid A says. Like how he was the epitome of confusion while we were having a conversation about whether God can die, piping up from the back seat, "Jesus died on the desk???"