Pooh Story # 3: Pooh breath

In this my second year of being a parent I’ve come to learn that all the vein popping, really terrible things about being a parent are temporary. I am as I type praying this theory plays out for the rest of my years. Hair pulling, biting, nose picking and gas to name a few are all things we’ve come to deal with and some have moved into the ranks of being a near distant memory. Most recently as in a few short hours ago, I nearly had a melt down over a diaper changing “incident”. We’ve thankfully moved into a phase of our son’s life where only about 1 in every 6-diaper changes is a full contact/tackle sport (people the world over should be knocking on wood as they read those words in an effort to cancel the jinx I’ve created by typing those very words). But this morning during his first diaper change of the day (read: before 6 am) Keenan engaged in a habit that is sometimes funny, sometimes brain splitting and nearly vomit inducing disgusting. Basically Keenan likes to toss his salad when he’s diaper free. Can’t say I blame him much, given the fact he’s wearing a hot diaper around his fixin’s pretty much 24/7. It’s gotta feel good to well, feel them. Anyhow, we usually get a kick out of this and it’s of course never a problem when we’re changing a pee only diaper the BIG problem is when there’s pooh involved. It’s such a freakin’ nightmare to get the pooh off his hands before he gets it everywhere. Keenan never sits still so there’s always flicking, clapping, waving, wiggling and kicking involved in every diaper change so you can imagine the horror when any one of those actions is paired with pooh. Baby hands + twig and berries + pooh = parental meltdown. Today and for the second time in about 2 weeks (please don’t let this be a pattern) Keenan put his hands in his pooh, waved them about and then put them directly in his mouth. The hands got in the mouth while I was trying to keep the kicking feet out of the diaper. Obviously my triage priorities were backwards. Feet in diaper are less likely to get into mouth than hands in diaper. It was before 6 am don’t forget. My excessive cursing roused Sean from our bed and he came to my rescue. Sean held the bottom end while I cleaned the hands as best I could. Then I finished up with the bottom end while Sean washed his own hands. Keenan was standing up on the change table while I snapped his shirt closed. His face was level with mine and he giggled his poohy breathe all over me…Flash back about 10 years ago to a child-less Nancy and Sean on our first camping trip together on Salt Spring Island. We hitch hiked into Ganges for a coffee and some groceries. We were sitting in a trendy little outdoor café and there was a young woman sitting a couple of tables away with two young boys. They were about 6 and 8 years old. She had a dreamy Parisian accent but her boys were a little less than dreamy. At one point she looked at one of them and yelled, “You’re a horrible little boy”. I thought to myself “what an awful thing to say to your child, I’m never say that kind of thing to my children”…Well this morning I was calling our “pooh ingesting toddler” things that were way worse (I may or may not have called him a “shit eating nightmare of a child”). Oh, how my image of that Parisian woman has changed. By now she’s a wise, sagely, saint of a mother with kids nearly out of high school and I’m a recently minted mom left praying for the day we move out of this poohy hands phase.