Well, she got me.  She got me good.  I am now 2 for 2 with my offspring in this particular area.  The area: them taking a big hairy crap on me.  You might remember Frank’s epic struggle to cover me in his diaper doilies, chronicled here: It looked like mud!

I know we all get peed on by our kids in the normal course of changing a diaper or two. This wasn’t even close to that.  This was a surprise attack.  This was a calculated flanking “movement” if you will.  This happened during the 11pm feeding period when I would least expect it.  Crafty this little one is.  Here is a mug shot of the accused.

Here are the facts.  She woke up at 11pm for her last feed of the day.  It was all going so well.  I changed her diaper before we started so as not to lay her flat after feeding an enflame her reflux more than normal.  Then she was knocking back her formula, humming along.  I was making up my own words to some of my favorite songs, as I am want to do while I hold my children. Most are not safe for public consumption. Ironically they mostly are made up of toilet humor. The songs I was working on at that time was a harbinger of the nights festivities.

So we’re cruising along, I’m thinking she’ll get done by 11:20, then 30 minutes upright to let her reflux die down, and then it’s off to bed for her and I’m snoring by 12:15 waiting for her 2:30am feed.  Yeah, not quite.

At the halfway point of the bottle I sat her up to burp and noticed/felt like her onesie was a little wet.  So add 5 minutes to changer her diaper (again) before I put her down to sleep.  She cranks out a huge burp and was back at the bottle.  She took care of four ounces in no time at all, but my arm felt really wet now.  I’m thinking is this stuff just running out of her.  I wish.  I sit her up and in the dim lights of the late evening my arm appears to have changed color.  Black in fact, it appears to be black.  It’s late, I’m tired, mind not clicking.  Then I lift her up and my lap is black, but she is clean, nothing on her legs, onesie, nothing.

Then I see it.  Her diaper was sticking out from under her onesie and was pinched to the point of making a nozzle from which the black tar of terror was spraying.  I’m a man of math and physics.  I love seeing the laws of such in action.  This was a form of the Bernoulli equation in action.  Think pressing your finger over the end of a garden hose to get the water stream to shoot father and faster.  Problem: this wasn’t a garden hose, that wasn’t water, and I’m not loving this at all.  The flow finally subsided, or so I thought. Just to make sure I knew what was happening she fired off one last burst that hit my shirt and got dangerously close to my face.  Time to move.

For the moment I was sitting still trying to figure out how to get up but keep the black tide of death from getting all over the chair, the carpet, etc…  Well once she took aim at my face that all went out the window.  I shot up and moved to her changing table.  I don’t think I’ve moved that quick since almost missing the ice cream truck on my street.

Of course as a lot of you know, Anne Marie came home on a heart monitor.  It has two little leads that run from her chest into an adapter then into the machine.  If her heart rate drops or her breathing slows the alarm starts to beep.  If the leads lose contact with her the alarm goes off in one long ear splitting tone.  As I moved with cat like quickness to escape the tsunami of excrement, I stepped on the wire and the two leads popped out of the adapter.  It’s now about 11:45pm and the alarm is blaring, I’m holding the kid who is now screaming, I have a metric ton of baby bowels on me and the monitor takes two hands, or two very dexterous fingers from the same hand, to turn off.  Turning it off is my only hope here.  No way I can reach down to the floor and reinsert the two minuscule leads back into their adapter.

There was a moment of freedom hidden in all this.  With all that noise I was free to unleash an avalanche of vulgarity, unheard by anyone, which of course solves nothing. But don’t believe the bad press, it does make you feel better.

At the end of the day, and I mean literally at the end of the day as it was now 12:20 in the am, I got the whole thing cleaned up, tossed my “dirty” clothes in the trash, and commenced to putting Anne Marie to bed.  There was no saving the clothes.  They were history.  Shame too, my favorite pair of home shorts.  At least to Tracy they were supposed to be home shorts, but I would sneak out to the Kroger or CVS in them. Faithful they were, till the bitter end.  The muffled somber sound of Taps could be heard playing in our neighborhood as I buried them in our big green Waste Management trash can, like the scene from the movie A Christmas Story, when the old man buried his leg lamp.

Here are some shots of the pint size perpetrator, now 10 pounds 6 ounces.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So both my kids have managed to evacuate their bowels all over me.  I’m trying to find the silver lining, the lesson, the part of this experience that makes me a better man.

Eh, I got nothing.