Archives for August 2007

I’m going to take a couple of days off from the blog so that I can devote my full attention to coughing up a lung and then hopefully jump on the road to chest cold recovery. Since a lot of you are fairly new to my little neck of the bloggy woods, I’ve set some stuff in the archives to auto-post.

The words “quiet dignity” come to mind.

While Alex seems to have mastered the, um, liquid aspect of potty training, the, um, other aspect is proving a bit more challenging. And of course by “challenging” I mean “I could pull out every single increasingly gray hair in my head from frustration.”

As I nearly did yesterday afternoon.

And since A. generally gets terribly upset when he has an accident – resulting in your basic teeth-gnashing and garden-variety wailing – I usually have to calm him down a bit before I can inspect the, well, severity of the accident “site,” as it were.

Which I will not be describing in detail. Because I care about you.

So after yesterday’s sobbing subsided, I told A. to stand right. where. he. was. I was fearful that if he started to walk, the contents would, er, dislodge, and I’d have an entirely different kind of mess on my hands (not to mention my floors). I managed to move A. over to a towel I’d spread out while I gently – gently! – pulled off his underwear.

Underwear safely removed, I gently – gently! – made my way toward the bathroom. To, you know, dispose of some stuff. I was cradling those underoos like I was carrying fine china on a silver tray, and I can say in all honesty that I’ve never been so intent on not touching “china” in my life.

But it probably won’t surprise you, given my long history of grace and poise, that I tripped about two feet away the commode.

It never ceases to amaze me that, in times of duress, seconds seem to stretch on for hours, and the human brain can process several – lo, many – pieces of information in a very short span of time.

My brain, as it turned out, honed in on three critical facts:

1) Oh sweet lordy, I tripped.
2) Oh sweet lordy, I’m carrying poo.
3) Oh sweet lordy, WHAT IF I DROP IT? WHAT IF I DROP THE POO?

And in a moment that would certainly be featured on SportsCenter if cameras had been in place and if I hadn’t been juggling, you know, DOO-DOO, I recovered in such a way that I in fact propelled the substance in question straight into the commode.

Like a lay-up. Or something.

You would probably feel really sorry for me if I told you that the flushing sounded like wild applause, so I won’t tell you that part. But I think you would’ve clapped if you had seen my mad skillz in action.

By the way, as I was “taking it to the hoop,” the underwear never left my hands and protected me from the poo like a shield, which probably had something to do with the fact that Batman’s picture was all over them. Poo-repelling is one of Batman’s lesser-known powers, apparently.

And thus concludes Episode #3,293 of Things I Never Experienced Before Motherhood.

The joy, it would seem, is unending.

This post was originally published on August 18, 2006.