Hot Sh*t

So I guess I shouldn't have been all proud and smug at the fact that Elsa pooped on the potty the other day. That's one of the beautifully ironic things about kids:  They do something to make you think they're advanced, a prodigy, some sort of savant....But then they add a their own twist to their new trick and things go horribly wrong really fast.

I had just given the kids a bath and brought Elsa into her room to put on her pajamas. ( Rollie was much more interested in streaking around the house singing It's a small world after all to be bothered with such formalities as getting dressed.)  She was all cute and pink and naked, and I had a mountain of clean laundry on her changing table, so I let her crawl around her room while I put her clothes away.  She immediately made a beeline for the door and pushed it shut--her latest trick. Then I heard her playing with her Dora kitchen, dumping her five-jillion books out of her basket, emptying every puzzle piece from their respective puzzles onto the floor and laughing heartily at the mess she managed to make in a span of 8 seconds.

Just as I was congratulating myself for finding the mate to one of Elsa's adorably little pink striped socks, I heard Elsa say "Uh-oh."

Now, normally Uh-Oh could mean sooo many different things.  Depending on the circumstances, the child, the phase of the moon, Uh-Oh could mean, I just dropped my sippy cup in the dog bowl.  Or, I broke your favorite coffee mug.  Or, I just swallowed my own tongue.  So I tend not to get too excited when Elsa says Uh-Oh.  It's Rollie who is usually on the 'Swallowed my own tongue' end of the Uh-Oh spectrum.

As you can probably already guess, not responding to Elsa's Uh-Oh immediately was a gross oversight on my part.  And I do mean Gross oversight.  Because Elsa's next declaration was, "Yuck."  And this time, I responded.

I turned to see that Elsa had deposited a considerably large turd on the carpet right in front of the door, and had then decided that it would be neat to squish a piece of it between her fingers, and then smear it on her legs.  Not sure which act had elicited the 'yuck' from her.  Probably the smearing.

"Ah!" I shrieked, and ran to stop her before she went after the turd again.  I picked her up by the one spot I could tell didn't yet have feces on it--her middle.  And there I held her, her chubby legs kicking, her arms flailing, as she giggled and said 'yuck' again and again.  I was stuck.  I couldn't put her down because she was covered in poop, I couldn't open the door because doing so would smear the rest of the poop across the carpet in a big brown rainbow.  It was like the scene from a horror movie.  Any moment I knew that Rollie could come bursting through the door and walk right into the trap.  I couldn't yell for him, Jeff wasn't home yet, and Elsa was getting so heavy.  So heavy.

Finally I carried Elsa to her changing table and popped open her box of wipes with my chin.  I then shifted her into the crux of my left arm and cleaned her off one-handed with about fifty wipes--just enough so I could put her down and turn my attention to the log on the floor.  The crisis was more or less contained.

This was, however, a good lesson in humility for me.  Here I was, thinking that Elsa was a genius for knowing that she should poop on the potty before she could even walk (nevermind that she is almost 16 months old and FINALLY taking steps by herself).  But of course, just when I think she's better than another kid because she waves bye-bye to anything with a pulse and imitates talking on a cell phone, she  takes a dump on the floor and rubs it on herself.  I wonder if Einstein ever did stuff like that....