Rubber gloves and a face mask

While I was peacefully eating my lunch at 11:30am today, Amber walked in. She had demanded and devoured a 10:45am sandwich and then trotted off to play while I ate. I heard her go into the bathroom, then she came out a little while later.

"Ummm, Mommy? I fink I pooped in my undies." she said matter-of-fact-ly. I wanted to weep, flail about in anguish, and shake my fist at the universe. Instead, I took a deep breath, swallowed my food, and replied,

"Oh no! Poop goes in the potty! Go to the bathroom and wait for me to help you."

Amber waddled out of the kitchen and down the hall to the bathroom. I was only halfway done with my lunch, and my appetite was fading fast at the thought of the poopy task ahead of me, but I knew that I would never finish eating if I stopped halfway through my meal to go clean up poop. So I soldiered on, eating my juicy turkey burger and crunching my crispy carrots. Amber came into the kitchen again.

"Mommy, can you help me?"

"I will be done eating my lunch in six minutes. Go wait in the bathroom and I will come help you in six minutes," I told her. Standing around in uncomfortable poopy underwear seemed like a good enough punishment for randomly pooping in her pants. She's not sick. She is four years and two months old. She has been reliably potty trained for nearly six months now, with next to zero problems even at night. This felt like one of Amber's experiments--she likes to experiment with my sanity. Test my mettle. See how far she can push me. The deliberateness of her experiments are sometimes almost worse than the experiments themselves! She tried pooping her pants two weeks ago randomly and I told her how yucky it was and I extracted a promise from her not to do it again. Bottom line: Amber should know better than to poop her pants, and I reasoned that maybe wearing poopy undies for six minutes longer than she wanted to would help teach/remind her of that fact.

I forgot who I was dealing with.

Two minutes later, Amber came back out of the bathroom. "Look at my foot, Mommy!" she said. I looked. The entire top of her foot was covered in brown sticky POOP. I begin to understand why mankind thought up stronger words for human excrement. Poop is just too weak a word to describe what was now smeared all over my four year old daughter's foot-top along with both of her hands. She had clearly gotten bored waiting for two minutes in the bathroom and gone digging for some entertainment. GAG.

Usually I encourage Amber to dig in the dirt and play in the mud. I love that she is a little Wonder Woman Kitty Princess of Power with an affinity for tiaras, weapons, dresses, and dirt. But today it did not work for me. I guess if I can run an entire mile in six minutes, Amber can cover even more ground, especially since she doesn't care what it smells like.

I sent Amber and her poopy extremities back to the bathroom with a shriek, gobbled down my remaining carrots, and geared up. I rolled up my sleeves, pulled on my rubber gloves, dug out one of our N-99 filter masks (which we used for wildfire smoke last fall), and strapped it over my ears. I was ready to do battle.

As I walked down the short hallway to the bathroom, the smell of poop hit my nostrils, straight though the thick smothering mask. I yanked it off thinking venomously how pointless the thing was if it could filter out microscopic smoke particles but not the simple scent of human feces. The minute I removed the mask, the stink got stronger--MUCH stronger. I snapped the mask back on and cinched it up on my ears. Ok, so N-99 filters do help with horrible smells, but I guess even just smelling 1% of disgusting poop air is still awful to my sensitive olfactory system. I snapped a quick picture before confronting the mess.

Pictures never do mischief justice.

First, I removed Amber's pants and underwear gasping/yelling DON'T TOUCH ME! several times while I wrestled the tight little leggings off of her, smudging poop down her legs. Blessedly, no chunks fell onto the floor as I quickly bundled the mass--pants, underwear, and all--into a plastic bag and shoved it into an old cereal box that was waiting to be taken to the trash bin outside.

Back in the bathroom, I lifted Amber into the bathtub and started spraying off her various brown sticky stinky patches with our handy shower head on a hose. Some of it was too stuck for a simple water pressure spray-down, so I dug an old package of wet wipes out from under the bathroom sink and used one as a wash cloth, scrubbing Amber down thoroughly with it.

Next came soap, round one: I used several large squirts of antibacterial hand soap to scrub Amber's hands, fingernails, feet, toenails, and in between her toes. GAG. I thought only newborns managed to get poop in between their toes. 

After the girl's extremities were sufficiently sanitized, I moved on to soap, round two: Grabbing the bar of Dove soap in my rubber gloved hands, I soaped her entire body from the neck down into a thick cleansing lather: lather, rinse, repeat in key areas. As I finished rinsing off the last of the soap, I realized that if there was poop on both of Amber's hands there were likely at least traces of the gunk in her hair. I groaned internally. Usually we only wash Amber's wild mane once a week, before church on Saturday night or Sunday morning. We had just washed it a scant 48 hours before this poop incident. I should have had another four-to-five days of reprieve before having to tackle that formidable task again! But there was nothing for it; her hair had to be washed. It went about as well as it always does...

Spray down wild curls. ("Amber, calm down!" Close your eyes!) Squeeze a blob of shampoo into hand. ("Amber, stand still!") Rub in shampoo. ("Amber, turn around.") Wash out shampoo. ("Stop moving! Head up!") Squeeze a blob of conditioner into hand. ("Stand still!") Rub conditioner into wild wet hair. ("Tip your head up.") Wash out conditioner. ("Close your eyes!") 

At last Amber was squeaky clean all over. I moved her bare dripping body to the very back of the tub and got out the Clorox shower cleaner. I sprayed the tub all over with it and then scrubbed that Clorox spray with a Clorox wipe for good measure. Then I rinsed it all out. Finally Amber could fill the tub with water and play in a clean bath, which she did happily. But it wasn't over for me... 

I scrubbed the bathroom floor, cursing the weird splotchy patterned tan linoleum--splotchy brown is a terrible color for a bathroom floor. I removed the soiled bath mat and started a load of laundry. I threw the bagged poopy clothes into the trash can outside. Thank goodness she was growing out of those pants anyways. I scrubbed a large section of the kitchen floor (same splotchy brown linoleum) to pick up any unseen poop smudges. I retained just enough of my sense of humor during Operation Sanitize to take a picture of myself scrubbing the kitchen floor. I sent it to Jeff with the caption "you don't want to know." I sanitized the shower faucet handle, the antibacterial soap bottle, and the sink faucet handle, and disposed of the soiled Clorox wipes. 

I removed my mask and crawled along the hallway carpet, sniffing and searching for any poopy evidence. Thankfully I did not detect any, but I still felt paranoid because our carpet is brown with darker brown speckles in it. When we lived in our old house, I thought white carpet was stressful, and it's true. White carpet is stressful in one way. Brown carpet is stressful in a completely different way. I removed my socks for good measure, washed my rubber gloves in lots of dish soap, and laid them out to dry. I turned on the kitchen ventilation fan to air out the last of the smell. 

Total elapsed time: 40 minutes.

While Amber played in the bathtub, I sat down at the computer, exhausted, to ventilate my feelings about the incident. Typing therapy is my most effective self-prescribed medicine.

At the end of this poopy ordeal, I discovered that my period had started sometime between scrubbing poop out of Amber's fingernails and sniffing for poop down the hallway carpet. Thank goodness for my recently replenished stock of chocolate! 

But chocolate is brown.