Cedar's Party: Here's The Poop

Hey y'all -

It was Cedar's birthday last weekend, and to celebrate, her family planned a trip to the hot springs. The trip was not without incident.

As a general rule, I try not to mention poop on this blog, because nobody wants to read about it. I don't want to scare the childless readers away from procreating, and I don't want to trigger any PTSD in the parents who've lived through it. So I'll endeavor to be as delicate as possible here.

There will come a few times in every parent's life when s/he will encounter a Poop That Shall Live In Infamy. My parents can still tell the story of how, as the result of a particularly harrowing incident when I was a baby, we came to be banned from a seafood restaurant in Gulf Shores. Mention Laney's "Dried Apple Poop of 2010" to your dad and me, and we'll still shudder like we've just slugged back a shot of cheap tequila.

We were on our way to the hot springs when the car started to smell. Laney and I played a few rounds of "It wasn't me!" before determining that the cause of the problem was the sleeping Hagen. We made it to the hotel parking lot; the room wasn't ready and wouldn't be for quite some time, so I knew I was going to have to change Hagen in the back of the car. When I picked him up from his car seat, I discovered that he'd had what those in the diaper industry would refer to as a "blow out." From his neck to his ankles, people. On his clothes. On his seat. On his hands. On his feet.

If I had more disposable income, I'd'a hosed off the baby and abandoned the vehicle.

I got him laid down in the back of the SUV on a beach towel, reached into my diaper bag for the wipes and discovered they were frozen. I'd left the bag in the car the night before, and because this is Montana and it's only the end of March, they had frozen solid and I was looking at an icy brick of unusable wet wipes. OF COURSE. In the end, I took a bottle of water and a pile of dirty clothes I happened to have in the back of the car, and cleaned Hagen off using water and laundry. I tried to only use things that belong to your dad, because I felt like in some way, he should also be participating in this catastrophe.

My friend Will has made up a little bluegrass jingle about my life that he sings to me sometimes in a nasally whine:

Pioneer Mom! Pioneer Mom!
How does she do it...all day loooong?

As the snow was falling around me in that parking lot, and I was ruining several of your dad's favorite T-shirts, don't think I wasn't singing that song, loud and proud.

Love,
Mom

P.S. I did eventually get you bathed off and the day took a turn for the better. Happy birthday, Cedar!