An aversion to all things poopy

Anyone who thinks they had a worse day than I had is wrong.   ....Okay, maybe yours was worse if you lost a family member or had to have a foot amputated or something of that nature, but otherwise I win. Or lose, depending on how you look at it.

The last 7 months have been wrought with minor meltdowns on my part. Lack of sleep, frustration with a baby who just don't understand what you're saying (because she's, you know, a baby), dealing with feelings of loneliness in the transition from socializing adult to home-bound hermit. There has been crying, yelling, throwing of things, screaming into pillows, and a general stank attitude on many occasions. Plenty of meltdowns to be had. Yesterday was probably the worst one.

So Clara has been teething which isn't fun, for her or me. She has been generally crabby and inconsolable for the last few days and I am reaching the end of my rope. I always hear from people that "some babies have a harder time with teething than others", and if I ever meet someone whose child wasn't at all phased by teething I will seriously kick them in the shins. And why are baby teeth so painful anyway? They're just these teeny tiny little bone spurs, essentially, and they fall out in 5 to 10 years. What a friggin' waste. Anyway. She was really cranky yesterday and I was frustrated.

Her newest move is the alligator roll. Whenever I try to change her diaper, as soon as I take off the dirty diaper and go to put a new one on, she rolls onto her belly. This is not easy to deal with on a changing table because she almost always nearly falls off. When she has a poop diaper this is particularly problematic because she rolls and the poop gets eeeeeeeevvvvvvveeeeeerrrrrrrryyyyyyywwwwwwwhhhhhhheeeeeeerrrrrrrrreeeeeeee. On her, on me, on the changing table, on her clothes, on the new diaper. It's awful and it's one of the most frustrating things I've ever dealt with. I've tried giving her things to hold while I change her diaper but she just holds them and rolls with them so she ends up lying on them. I've tried keeping her attention upward with a mobile, with things on the wall, with singing, nothing works. This scene is simply destined to repeat itself. Yesterday she had two awful poop diapers that this happened with. Two outfits, two changing table covers, two baths, two shirts for me. And that wasn't the end.

Clara was playing in the living room and I thought I smelled poop, so I checked her diaper and it was clean. A few minutes later I look down at my feet (I had been sitting on the couch because sitting on the floor hurts my back after a few minutes), and Clara was sitting in front of a big pile of glop. She held her hand up in pure delight and I saw that she was grasping a huge hunk of something green. I looked down and saw that it was poop. She was holding a chunk of poop. Then I looked at the glop and realized it was poop, too. And none of it was hers. Eventually I surmised that it belonged to one of my cats. He must have gotten sick and had a huge, disgusting accident right in front of me and I didn't even realize it, and now my daughter was playing in it. I scooped her up and put her in the sink and washed off her hand, then put her in her crib so I could clean up the mess without her getting into it again. Only since she was so cranky, as soon as I walked out of the room she just sat up in her crib sobbing and screaming at the top of her lungs. I cleaned the poop mess up the best I could, gagging the whole time, and brought her out into her hair chair, hoping that she would be happier if she could see me.

At this point I wanted to vacuum the rest of the floor because I had discovered a second pile of poop. Our carpet is shaggy and brown so things that I don't want to step have a tendency to just blend in. I wanted to vacuum and make sure there were no other surprises.

As I put Clara in her high chair, I saw a very large gathering of ants underneath it. Great. I strapped her in, grabbed the Swiffer Wet Jet and got started on killing and cleaning up the piles of ants. Unfortunately, some of Clara's toys that were on the floor had ants on them (curse me and my laziness for not picking them up the night before!), so I brushed them off and gave them to her to play with while I kept cleaning. When I was done with the floor I looked at her and saw that her whole food tray was covered in ants, and there were a bunch crawling on her, too.

Are you sympathizing with me yet? No? Then get out.

I stripped her down, cleaned her off, cleaned the chair off, all with her shrieking and screaming and being generally upset with me, and I decided I couldn't handle it anymore. I had to call the husband.

Eric knows how stubborn I am and he knows that I only ask for help about 3 seconds before I am about to literally fall into a heap on the floor, so he came straight home and took over for me while I lay on the bed crying. He walked up and down the hall with Clara, looking at photos and talking quietly, changed her next diaper and got her dressed to go to her grandpa's house, and he even offered to let me have some beers with dinner, which is a VERY generous offer in our household. So I guess that I can take comfort in the fact that my day at least ended in a nice note, even though most of it was shitty. Pun intended.