Sunday morning both Leta and I took a mid-morning nap as Jon worked on CSS or XHTML or UNIX or some other alien language on the Millennium Falcon Machine in the basement. When Leta wakes up she usually babbles but when she woke up from this nap she started whimpering like an injured fawn who is lost in the forest.
Since I was taking a nap it was Jon’s responsibility to retrieve The Spawn from her crib when she woke up but the whimpering startled me. I rolled out of bed and stumbled half-awake into her room to see what appendage she might have stuck in the crib, but there was no stuckage to be seen, no. Instead, she sat upright on her knees, her hands covered in what looked like pasta sauce, her forehead smeared with war paint.
I picked her up under her arms and held her at least a foot away from my body. And then the smell hit me LIKE AN AX IN THE FACE. I managed to turn her body away from mine and then I saw it, the Pasta Poop, an explosion of meatballs and sauce out the top of her diaper splattered up like the spray of a fountain into the back of her hair. I glanced at the crib and noticed two plum-sized turds sitting like menacing eight balls in the middle of her blanket.
“JON! JON!” I could barely breathe. “YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS. OH. MY. GOD.”
Jon came running up the stairs thinking that we were both dead. “What? WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED?”
“POOP! POOP!”
“WHAT?”
“POOP!”
“POOP?”
“POOP!”
You would have thought that neither of us had ever seen poop in our lives. The mess, it was like we were witnessing the depths of Hell and both of us in that moment were scared straight back into religion.
Leta had no idea what was going on and she could sense that whatever it was couldn’t be good because neither of us wanted to hold her. Jon carried her like a dead rat to the changing table to assess the damage as I ran to the bathroom and drew a bath. “Oh, God, Leta, STOP! STOP!” Jon was flailing and hysterical as Leta rubbed FECES into her eyebrows. She was crying at this point and rubbing her poopy hands into her eyes and mouth. Jon couldn’t wipe fast enough.
“How did this happen?” He screamed from her room.
“How did this happen? HOW WOULD I KNOW? She pooped and it exploded.”
“I know that, how did it happen?”
“It’s not my fault if that’s what you’re getting at. Who knows how it happened, IT HAPPENED.”
“I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t understand the physics of this. How did it get EVERYWHERE?”
And then I remembered. Oops. This scenario is what my father would refer to as a classic case of Murphy’s Law: if it can happen it will happen. Leta is at the top weight for one size of diaper and the bottom weight for the next diaper up. We have an entire box of the bigger diaper sitting unopened next to her crib, but we had at least 10 diapers of the smaller size left and we didn’t want them to go to waste.
So we took our chances that in the span of time required to use up those 10 diapers she wouldn’t have a nuclear bomb of meatballs shoot out her ass. What were the odds?
Leta had a surprise morning bath. We had to drain the tub twice because the water kept turning brown and Leta LOVES to bend over put her face in the water. OF COURSE she loves to sip bath water. She won’t drink from a sippy cup but OH YUMMY DIRTY FECES SOUP.