Diary of an omniturnal mom

The perfect shit storm

I realized recently that my first "diary" posting, as I've decided to call these occasional entries, was written using third person pronouns. Which is not how a diary is normally written. I chalked it up to extreme sleep deprivation. But then it occurred to me that I do refer to myself in the third person quite often. Mommy is going potty. Mommy is fixing a snack. Mommy is driving; she can't reach your toy right now. Mommy will stop this van if you don't stop screaming. And on and on and on. I'm like Bob Dole, only a lot prettier. And younger.


And I also don't like to overuse first-person pronouns. Sometimes sentences will be awkwardly rewritten so as to avoid too many first-person pronouns in one paragraph. See how I did that? I never want to come off as narcissistic, which, of course, is why I have a blog and talk incessantly about my kids and my life. Anyhow, for now, a diary written in the third-person it is ... what can I say? I'm a trendsetter, who reserves the right to change back to a first-person diary at any time. The following is continued from the last entry because it really just kept getting better ... (I'm a little behind. Sue me. ... actually, don't, I have no money.)

Thursday evening

Mommy hears the familiar sound of the washing machine and the bathtub running. And it's after 9 p.m. That's never good. Curiosity gets the better of her and she heads upstairs. Fiona's bedroom light is on.

Her husband says, "I wouldn't go in there if I were you."

Fiona had pooped in her diaper and smeared it on the floor, her kitchen set, her chair and table, some of the plastic food from her kitchen.

Emergency bathtime, room sanitizing and laundromat at 9 p.m.

Friday evening

The Rug Doctor is in the house. A rather good-looking shirtless guy is shampooing all the carpets in the house, sucking probably a decade worth of dirt, dog hair, urine, poop, baby spit up and God knows what else out of the rugs.

Everything looks and smells clean. Mommy now feels much better about the baby crawling around in Fiona's room.

Saturday morning


Mommy finds a stray piece of poop in a laundry basket that the kids are playing in. It's as if poop just materializes out of thin air. She does a quick bottom check and determines that it's probably an older specimen. She imagines that she'll be finding petrified bits of poop around the house for the next 10 years.


As for Fiona, Mommy is on her like mosquitoes at dusk to be sure that all future deposits are made in the approved receptacle.

Saturday afternoon

Mommy puts on her poop coach hat and coaxes a poop out of Princess Poopy before nap time. 

She then draws herself a bath since Fiona seems to be settled. Her sense of relief is short lived.

A few minutes of indignant screaming followed by silence deserves a peek. Mommy was too optimistic. Fiona, sans bottoms, looks up innocently as she smears poop on her little table.

"Poop," she says.

It's all over the floor, her shirt, the table, a chair, a plastic burger, a tea cup.

Mommy puts the chair, the toys and the girl in the tub. Meanwhile her bath is getting cold and the baby won't go down for his nap. So she decides to bathe him, too, after taking care of Princess Poopy. He poops in the tub.

(Really.)

Okay, nap time for baby. Time for a breather and a bath. She and her husband have a party to go for his company that evening. She's not really looking forward to it; she just wants to get out of the house and be clean for a while.

After the baby's nap, he's poopy again. Mommy wonders what the hell these kids have been eating to be pooping so much. Baby changed, diaper sprayed off, toilet flushed.

Toilet overflows.

(I'm not even kidding.)

She moves the baby to the hallway and shuts the door, which prompts hysterical screams either because he loves Mommy so much or he wants to crawl around in the poopy water that is now spreading across the floor.

Mommy yells at the ceiling, because that's where God lives, "Please, can you make this any worse? I don't think you've quite outdone yourself."

She's now padding around in bare feet in poopy water with large beach towels trying to stem the flow.
So, yes, indeed, God decided to make it worse.

She rinses off her feet in the shower and just starts yelling and mumbling randomly about poop and children and how tired she is shoveling poop. It's beginning to feel like a barnyard here. In fact, she no longer wants to live out in the country and raise chickens for eggs and have a cow for milk. Too much poop. She doesn't care if  it is good fertilizer. Why can't kids' poop be good fertilizer, she thinks. At least it would be useful.

Her husband is called in for plunging because she apparently cannot plunge a toilet properly. Her best solution to toilet overflow is to turn the water off, clean the floor, lock the bathroom and wait till the calvary arrives. (I also do a variation of this when large, scary bugs are involved.)

Her mother and father arrive at the tail end of this shit storm. Her mother tries not to laugh.

Saturday evening

That party they were supposed to go to? Forget about it.  Her husband walks into their closet, which doubles as a "bedroom" for the baby when he won't go back to sleep, and says "I have nothing to wear. I don't really want to go."

She says, "I don't want to go either. Let's go to a movie." They're not really party people. Back when they were, they usually couldn't remember how they got home.

Guess what? They're not movie people either. Nothing looked interesting, and, really, if they're going to spend two hours in the dark these days, they'd prefer to be sleeping. At least she would. He'd be on his deathbed and want to ... oh, nevermind.

They got some coffee, drove around for a while and tried to remember what they used to like doing. Driving in the van with a cup of hot coffee and no kids was good enough that night.