This is a picture of my little lumpkin in a huge hat in a hole in the sand. There's no place he'd rather be. On
Egg & Twig I blogged about our recent trip to the New Jersey shore. We really had a wonderful time. Our first 6 days there we had the pleasant company of my husband's family, but they had to leave a day early and we had our accommodations to ourselves for the last 24 hours. The rental felt empty without them, but the weather was still glorious and we wanted to make the most of our remaining time. We decided to make one last trip down to the beach that last morning before lunch.
My son (16 months) had been eating heartily all week. Actually, we all had. We were at our leisure to make excellent meals and the boardwalk provided a wide array of tempting treats. But my son was in the middle of a growth spurt and had really been packing it down, eating like food was going out of style. He had, as a result, also been filling diapers as if we owned Proctor & Gamble (Pampers) much to my dismay, as I had only packed 1 package of diapers and certainly didn't want to buy more at tourist-city prices. In any case, I had already changed him out of two soiled ones that last morning, and confident he had "finished," had gotten him beach-ready in a disposable swim diaper and rash guard.
I'm not exactly a veteran parent, but I'm not a newbie either. My oldest child is almost 5 and so I've twice survived the season of newborn blowouts, midnight feedings, and feeling that neither sanity, nor sleep, nor cleanliness of person or home would ever be mine again. So I should not have been surprised at how much can happen in the space of minutes, or how someone so very small could do so very much with so very little to work with, but I have to admit I rather was.
After dressing my little guy in his beach attire and slathering him up with sun screen, I had set him down to complete my own preparations, but got distracted reviewing pictures from the week on my camera. My husband and daughter were both getting ready in other rooms and weren't paying attention to the little cruiser either. He had crawled off a few feet from me and was opening and closing the drawers of the nightstand. My first indication that something was amiss was in the form of a smell. There shouldn't have
been a smell, since I had removed the other soiled diapers from the room long ago. But the assault on my nostrils prompted me to look up, after which the assault on my eyes caused me to gasp in horror. There was baby poop
everywhere.
I'm not the swearing type, but I am the panicking type, and I think the next words out of my mouth were something like this (directed at my husband): "HONEY. Poop. There's poop EVERYWHERE. There's POOP everywhere. POOP is everywhere. Oh gosh. HELP. Honey! THERE'S POOP!" I had picked the little imp up, who had an expression of blank innocence on his face, and also poop on his face, and was holding him under his armpits at an arm's length away. Poop was gushing through his balled-up fists, and out the sides of the useless swim diaper, and down his legs. And yes, it was also smeared just about everywhere else he had crawled or touched in the last few minutes.
My husband emerged from the bathroom, not amused, cautioned me to lower my voice so that the people above us didn't hear and call the owners of our rental, and marched grimly, dirty baby in hands, straight back into the bathroom. A moment later the shower was running. Only he knows what atrocities he washed down the drain, but I love him very much for doing so. That just left me with the other cleanup. It would have been much less of an emergency had we been at home, with access to our own cleaning supplies and no security deposit to worry about getting back, but we were in a pristine rental and there were partially digested bits of the previous night's soup everywhere. Corn, beans, carrots, all identifiable, though gruesomely disfigured. I got busy.
I told my daughter to look at a book in the other room. Then, into the washer went everything that could be washed. Armed with some hot soapy water and a washcloth, and gingerly stepping around the brown smudges on the floor, I then began to sniff all the other surfaces I thought my son might have touched. It was not a high point in my parenting career, but most parents will tell you:
you just do what you have to do. I was particularly concerned about a massive wicker chair in the corner where he had been; its coloring would have camouflaged any deposits quite well. Eventually I got everything cleaned to my satisfaction and allowed my husband and son to come out of the bathroom and get dressed again. All in all, I think we left our property cleaner than we found it, and we did, an hour or two later, make it to the beach that day. We had sure earned it.
