Exit Strategy

You're looking at me like I'm some kind of idiot now, and I have to say, I am some kind of idiot, but just what kind remains to be seen.  Regarding this latest craptacular incident, I'd like to say a few things in my defense:

You're supposed to have your bum out in the open for a while, which we haven't done on the most regular basis, just like the Vitamin D drops and something else I'm still trying to remember.  But you crap and crap, and no one ever knows when it's coming, so open-air derriere time has been put on hold repeatedly.  Out of fear.  The same fear that makes me open your diaper with what I imagine to be the same consternation as a rookie bomb technician.  The same fear that makes me jump back uncontrollably screaming and knocking cans off the shelves with my head every time you fart with your diaper open and my hands anywhere near your pooper.  It's the fear of being covered in fresh shit.

But in another moment of (we find out later, less-than) genius, I elaborated a plan.  I placed you in the crib, on your tummy, with no diaper.  BUT!  I put a diaper changing pad under you.

The way this went down in my own mind, worst-case scenario, was something like this: you enjoyed tummy time with your cute little bum in the air, but you pooped.  Oooooohhhhhh, I said.  Somebody made a poopy, but it's ok because we thought ahead and we have this changing pad here!   I then whisked you away in a blur of clean, efficient, whiteness.  I picked you up and we smiled as I removed the diaper changing pad with smug and satisfied dexterity, neatly folding it, taking it to the washer, and dropping it in with a clean smile.   We smiled at our genius as we turned on the washing machine, tossing in a little soap and nodding to each other because we knew it would come out All Clean.  I set an All-Clean you down and put on another diaper, cooing in a montage of  smiles and sanitation and the glow of a job well done - revealing, I see in retrospect, that my fantasy was derived from a commercial for detergent. 

Yes, I know this now.  If you put a baby on his tummy and he poops, the poop does not magically dispense itself neatly in a little pile waiting to be whisked away in gleaming, fifties-era commercial brightness.  Unfettered by a diaper, poop oozes out onto the person it came from, and just sort of spreads.  And there it is.  For a brief moment, it's just a pretty yellow shmear, collected into an elegant pool and looking benign and meaningless, like so much modern art.  Transfixed, you stand there staring at all this yolky crap and the tiny human squirming in it.  You think things like: this could be a commentary on post-modernist capitalistic Marxism.   But a stray thought begins to flicker away in your mind.  It takes form with every little jerk of tiny human legs and hands, each of them flinging a little drop of poop hither and fro.   The yellow begins to slide around, become jagged and multiply, to stink and to be sticky and you realize you will have to touch it.  As it spreads, the little thought forms a mouth and starts to speak to you.  You have no exit strategy, it says.  You are, it tells you, IN. THE. SHIT.

Because removing said tiny human squirming in yellow poop cannot be done the way you would normally pick up something covered in shit.  You can't just grab a corner of it and hold it at arms length while you go running for a trash can.  Nor can you scoop a baby up in a plastic bag and throw it away.  It began to dawn on me, as I looked at you, that I had to pick you up, and you were covered in poop, and then I had to somehow get the poopy things separated from the non-poopy things, so that eventually, everything was non-poopy.  It's a logical quagmire, though - like moving those frogs on a log - everything poopy makes everything else poopy, ad nauseum.  All of this had to be sorted out to the tune of your 100 decibel screaming, which interferes with my spatial and logical reasoning, as I think I may have mentioned on more than one occasion and which you continue to disregard.

So what happened?  I made some bad decisions.  Mistakes were made, and the following casualties were covered in shit: all of you, my arm, my face, my shirt, the plastic bars of the crib, 3 blankets, one bolster pillow, the baby swing, 2 receiving blankets, and of course, the diaper changing pad.  Ironically, the changing pad, the original and intended destination of the poop, sustained moderate but unimpressive damage. 

Not done.  We then moved it to the laundry room, where we covered a few other things in shit.  The dryer, the other diaper changing pad, three clean diapers, some clean laundry.  We're still finding things back there with little flecks of shit on them.  Thanks to your endless flailing, it really does look as though someone threw your actual shit into an actual fan.   

And so, Mr. Baby, in the immortal but oft-disregarded words of Colin Powell, which I think apply to adventures in baby poop almost as much, if not more, than to military action: Have a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement.  And do not (and Colin Powell never said this, although perhaps if he had....) base your exit strategy upon the dreamy remembrances of fabric softener commercials.