Parenting is tough. There's late nights, there's doctor appointments, and there's mass quantities of poop. Having kept our son alive and well for 6+ months, we feel that we have had our fair share of all of the above and have paid some parenting dues. But as we were taught last night, poop karma had other plans...
I had just picked Clark up from daycare and opened the front door after a long, hard day. I was greeted by the distinct aroma of a dirty diaper. It had been a hectic morning when we were trying to get everyone out the door, so I assumed in our haste, we had forgotten to throw away the first diaper of the day. After I set Bubba down and carefully scanned the living room for the culprit diaper, I realized that must be the case, as there was no diaper in sight.
My next best guess from my tenure as a parent was that our dog had had an accident. She has an incredibly delicate digestive system, and we were unable to get her to go to the bathroom before we left for work that day; usually a sure sign that we will be spending our evening shampooing and disinfecting a room of our house. I hadn't taken her out since I'd been home, so I was growing confident that Mia was the trouble maker. I scoured each room of the house, stopping to sniff every few moments, but I couldn't find anything.
Exhausted from the long work day, I settled into some pajamas and started to play with Clark. Every few minutes, I would get another distinct whiff of the foul smell. Clark has christened every article of clothing that we own with baby vomit, and on occasion, other bodily fluids, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that I was wearing remnants of a recent diaper change. Too tired to look any further, I lit a candle, changed pajama shirts, and relaxed.
Ryan came home not long after, and the moment he opened the door, he sniffed and made the same awful face I had an hour earlier. I exclaimed, 'I know! It smells like poop, but I can't find a stray diaper or wipe or even a gift from Mia!' Also exhausted, Ryan did a preliminary lap of all the places any of the above would usually be found, Febreezed the living room, and settled into the couch.
I handed the baby off and went to make myself a snack. Upon sitting down in the chair I had been in all evening, I looked at Ryan and nearly yelled, 'I just smelled poop again!' Feeling confident that a diaper had fallen down the back of the recliner, I leapt up, flipped the chair over, and starting taking in long, deep breaths. Hey - I smell a small person's butt several times a day, so smelling a chair didn't feel like I was stooping any lower than usual.
'I can't find it, but I swear there is a dirty diaper in this chair, Ryan!' The figurative lightbulb went off above both of our heads as we remembered that we had changed a dirty diaper in that very chair earlier that morning. Ever willing to help, Ryan handed Clark back to me and started digging in the chair himself.
A few seconds and a series of grunts that increased with intensity and disgust at each breath, my husband pulled his hand from in between the side and the cushion of the chair, and stood in the middle of our living room stoically. Mia jumped to her feet and had a sudden interest in Ryan's hand, while he stood there frozen like a statue, and the cold hard reality hit me. There was poop on his hand. Which meant there was poop in the chair. Loose, uncontained, God only knows how much poop. In the chair. Not on the chair, but IN the chair. Wedged. Smashed. Rotting even more than the original state of poop, which is awful in and of itself.
After Ryan unfroze and frantically washed his hands, my dear husband came back to the living room armed with baby wipes and plastic bags and heroically cleaned baby poop out from the inside of the chair I had been sitting in for hours. We deduced that a stray piece of poop had rolled out of the diaper and lodged itself between the arm and the cushion.
Tonight, I am thankful for a baby who is cute enough to help me forget this trauma, for a husband who isn't afraid to (literally) get his hands dirty so I don't have to, and for leather chairs. Seriously, thank you Jesus for leather chairs!
