Weathering the shit storm

A couple of weeks ago I dropped my mother-in-law off at the airport. As I was heading home I glanced at Huey in the rear view mirror and saw what looked like a blood smear on her knee. Great, I thought, I really need to do a better job at keeping her nails cut. She spent the 40-minute drive home doing her usual routine of whining, sucking her fingers, napping, screaming, sucking her fingers some more and then serenading me with her new favorite past time: shrieking like a pterodactyl, a sound that could shatter teeth.

It was with relief that I pulled into our garage. Huey and I both couldn't wait to get her out of her car seat. The car was fully packed as I'd just moved us out of my brother’s house. The back seat was packed with baskets of clean clothes and in the trunk were more clothes, the stroller, an activity gym, etc. Huey was boxed in on all sides.

As I bent to pull her out of the back seat I realized that that smear on her knee was not blood—it was shit. Orange shit. She hadn't crapped in three days (the pediatrician said babies her age can go two weeks without a bowel movement) so it had all come out at once. She had pooped such a large amount and with such force that it had blasted out of the left leg opening of her diaper and pooled into the V of her car seat. I hadn’t heard it happen, nor smelled the result, so she had spent the 40-minute drive from the airport smearing it all over her body.

And eating it.

EATING HER OWN CRAP.

I was horrified. I kept repeating, Oh my god! Oh my god! You're eating your own shit! Huey, her mouth crammed with all ten fingers, looked at me with huge, blinkety-blinking eyes, as if to say, What? What did I do?

I wrapped her in one of the clean kitchen towels, then maneuvered her over the baskets of clean clothes and ran up the stairs with her plastered to my front. Of course, this was one of the rare times I was wearing a white shirt. I dropped her in the tub, gave us both a good scrubbing, finally had a laugh about it all and chalked it up to reaching the ubiquitous parental milestone: getting shit on.

Since then she's shit on my only dry clean-only skirt, on our blanket, and on HH’s jeans.

Ah, parenthood. So glamorous.

When I told HH about her crapping herself in the car and eating it, his first question was, Did you photograph it?

Men.