Every night before I fall asleep, I have the best intentions for the next day. I am going to wake up early! Read scriptures! Make a nutritious breakfast, and go for a long walk with my cute dog and baby! In fact, if anyone asked me my morning routine, I would lie and say this even though this only happens this way, like, once every two weeks.
But still, I try to get all my ducks in a row the night before. Do the dishes, vacuum, get ahead on homework and photo edits. Because if I can somehow follow this perfect morning routine, then that will in turn lead to a perfect day, and everyone knows at the end of a perfect day you drop 10 lbs and win $1,000. So, obviously, it's the goal.
But the last two mornings, Dayen has been sick. And before anybody starts thinking what a bad mom I am: I am very concerned about it. I've been taking care of him nonstop, and in fact willingly went through the following because I love his cute face. But this is my blog, and this post is really all about me. So, there.
Yesterday I opened Dayen's door in the morning to the smell every mother loves to smell, and I knew there was trouble. Turns out, he had thrown up at some point during the night, and rather than waking us up and crying about it, he just fell back asleep in it. The effect was dried vomit stuck in his hair, on his face, and all over his blankets and stuffed animals. Do you people know how hard it is to change crib sheets? Who invented this system? Well, I did it anyway. I even gave Ellie, his favorite stuffed elephant, a special bath with baby soap and a rag so she wouldn't fall apart. As I sat there blow-drying a stuffed elephant, I realized my life hasn't exactly panned out the way I thought it would.
He went to bed last night feeling a lot better, and this morning his room smelled neutral, so I got a little too comfortable. I fed him breakfast and even did my makeup before 9 am. I found a cute outfit because, hey, why not?
Then I picked him up from his high chair and within seconds noticed my shirt felt wet.
The panic set in. Please oh please let this be my imagination.
I set him on the changing table, and saw, yep, the butt of his pajamas was soaked. I looked down and my shirt was soaked. I mean soaked. So, of course, I had to smell it. Because maybe it's not what I think it is. Maybe, somehow, my child sat in a puddle of Drakkar Noir and I am in for a special treat.
In this case though, you can probably guess what it was.
Really though, what was I hoping for? On the off chance it wasn't poop, did I really think it was going to be something good? If I found it to be, say, milk, would that really stop me from changing my shirt? (Ok, some days, yes.)
Anyway, after whining to my giggling child how gross that was, I pulled off his pajamas to find the world's worst April Fool's joke staring me in the face. I'm not going to post a picture because I refuse to be that person, though I did send a picture to my mom. And Caleb. But let's just say when the diaper came off, what had managed to remain inside broke loose like a dam and his newly washed changing table looked like... well, use your imagination. You know exactly what it looked like.
The next ten minutes were so poop-filled, I don't even know where to start. Cleaning up the dripping diaper? The pile of suddenly poopy laundry that, by the way, I had just finished the day before? The fact that I actually had to wipe poop off my wall?
Somehow I finally got Dayen in the tub and rushed around cleaning up. (And don't you worry, I changed my shirt.) And during one of my check-ins on Dayen's bath, I saw this.
Am I the only one who sees the irony? The kid literally had all his ducks in a row!
And that's when I realized:
We are all born pretty much a mess. We can't walk or talk, we can't do math (some of us never outgrow that), we even have to learn to use the bathroom on our own.
But everyday we learn and grow. We go to school for years, we put all our time and energy into growing into self-sustaining adults.
And we almost make it, too. We can see perfection glistening on the horizon, just within reach. We've almost got it all together.
And then we turn to our spouses and say, "Honey... we should have a baby."
And 9 months later we start the cycle all over again, but this time with our own kids.
I don't have time to live a perfect life, or to discover some brilliant scholarly thing (I don't even have time to think of a word other than thing) because I'm too busy cleaning up poop off every surface of my home!
How did this happen? Wasn't I supposed to be destined for greater things, or something like that? Do you know how many times I had to pause even just writing this blog post because Dayen was destroying something in the house?
So the moral of this feces-filled story, in case you missed it, is this: I love being a mom to this little stinker. But he is officially my excuse for not accomplishing anything worthy of a Nobel Prize. Or even passing math.
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