My lil' pooper!

Warning: the post contains references of bodily functions, including, but not limited to, those of a " number 2" variety. Don't read if you still have the illusions that your own child will not perform similar activities.

Sam is two. He is curious, but I always bragged to my friends that he had never done anything gross like digging in his diaper, taking off his clothes, or even taking off the diaper itself. Oh how I wish that I could go back in time and be more supportive when my friends complained. Maybe then they wouldn't have laughed when I told them what he does now.

We have been encouraging Sam to be more independent, mainly to make our own lives easier. So when we would got to the pool, we would tell him to take his own swim trunks off, or before a bath, to start stripping down. This innocent instruction took a hideous turn when I went in to get him after a nap and he was standing there, one arm through the neck of his shirt, no socks, pants, or diaper, looking so pleased at his efforts.

I did a thorough search of his bedding and found that, while he was pantless, nothing else icky had occurred. I breathed a sigh of relief, gave a quick lecture on why mommy and daddy were the only ones who should take off diapers, and thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't. This was the beginning of several weeks of sporadick partial nakedness. Often, we weren't lucky enough to survive unscathed, and I would be washing bedding, pillows, and even the occasional stuffed animal that had been watered, shall we say! But still I was ok, because nothing " else" had happened.

Then it did. One Sunday morning (why is it always Sunday?!) Sam was being a pill, Charlie was being a pill, I'm sure that Mark and I were pills too. I had already washed Sam's bedding, and poor Charlie's stuffed cat, once that morning due to a semi naked child found upon waking that morning. When the bad behavior landed him back in bed for a nap, he took things into his own hands, quite literally! I was feeding Charlie when Mark went in there to tell Sam to lie down and sleep, when Mark frantically called for help. I put a startled and still hungry Charlie down and ran into the bedroom. There was my boy, arms outstretched, naked, hands full of poop.

Sigh, innocence lost, paradigms shifted, worlds collapsing.

Picture, if you will, Charlie screaming with hunger, Sam crying and saying ewww at the top of his lungs, Mark trying not to hurl, and me, stuck firmly in the middle of the chaos, wondering what to do first. We cleaned off  Sam's hands, then Mark took him to the shower to hose off, I stripped the bed, again! Then threw it in the laundry and remade his bed. I fed Charlie, put him to bed. Then I texted my friend and had her teach my Sunday school lesson.

We duct-taped Sam into his diaper and put him to bed.

I will admit to feeling slightly smug when we went in to collect him after his nap and his pants were off, but his diaper was still firmly attached. You know you needed a win, when you celebrate one upping your two year old.We did not make it to church that day. By this point it was time to change back into pajama pants and hibernate. I had had enough.