The Last Poop

Oh, what a fiasco! The poop sampling, I mean. The last one was just a keystone cops of poop, I tell you.

First, I had "help." From Lily, that is. Somehow I'd managed the other samples while she was busy with Daddy or out of the house. Not this time. And was she ever curious. "Let me see your poop!" Well, what are you gonna say? I mean, I see her poop all the time. And she's proud of it, lately, because she's pooping in her little potty. She'll close the door and you have to wait outside, then she'll bring her potty to you--"Look at the poop I made!" It seemed cruel to tell her that adults really don't get that excited about poop.

Second, I'm valiantly attempting not to thwart my child's curiosity, or warp her idea of poop, when I hear the little hat fall into the toilet. You know what I mean, right? The little hat they give you to go into that hangs under the toilet seat but over the water? Yeah, well, it fell in. Super. So I'm trying to retreive it without it falling all the way in and submerging, rendering my sample inadmissible. I manage to save some of it, so I set it aside.

Third. I flush the rest of the crap, and the toilet overflows. Son of a ! The water is rising and I'm trying frantically to shut off the valve and I can't remember which way to turn the knob! I know it's righty tighty, lefty loosy, but is it righty offy, lefty onny, or vice versa?! I somehow manage to cut it off before it gets to the top. I get the plunger, which turns out to be a floppy piece of crap that turns inside out with each push, and Lily is meanwhile asking what I'm doing and why, and my patience is being severely tested. Then I hear Nora arrive downstairs. Oh, joy, let's have a poop party where everyone in the neighborhood gets to see Mommy's poop!! I send Lily downstairs to intercept Nora, but of course Lily brings her upstairs to see this fascinating event!

I tell her "You don't want to come in here" and leave it at that, and luckily she is able to get Lily to go downstairs to play, instead of staying to watch Mommy play with her poop.

Stool Sample

This is the most disgusting thing I've ever had to do. And here's the thing: it's not Lily's poop I have to collect. If it was, I wouldn't blink. It would be fine. But it's mine! And that grosses me out in a way that would never gross me out if it was Lily's. And that has really made me think. I mean, what the heck? Shouldn't it be easier to do mine? No, it isn't. I am intimate with my child's bodily machinations and products in a way that I'm really not with my own. Do I know her body better than my own? Is that strange?

I have some kind of something going on in my gastro thingies. Every time I eat I get horrible stomach cramps and then gas. It's awful. It started over the weekend of July 4th and I had diarrhea and I thought I was gonna die from the cramping. Then the nausea. I ended up going into the ER on the 4th, after not eating for 2 days and getting no sleep for that time either. It was crazy! They couldn't figure it out. I had to have morphine to calm me down from the pain so I could finally rest.

Lily and John went up on the roof of the parking structure at the hospital to see the fireworks while Mommy got her morphine. Hey, we know how to make the best of a bad situation. And she was so good.

So this stool sample thing. I went to the doctor today because after two weeks, I'm still having these cramps and gas, and they wanted all my bodily fluids. I had to take Lily in the bathroom with me to do the pee sample, and I swear, I wouldn't be surprised if she becomes a doctor. She's getting very comfortable with how bodies work. She doesn't flinch when they take her blood at the doctor's, and she was fascinated watching me get my blood taken. She doesn't want to poop in her potty yet (just pee), but she'll tell you she's hiding now (really she's just standing in one spot) because she's making a poop.

The nurse gave me the stool sample pack, and explained how to use the little hat that you put in the toilet to catch your poop. Oh, but there's more. I think it used to be that you just put your poop in a jar or something and brought it in. Not anymore! Now, to save costs, you get to be a lab tech at home! There's two vials of chemicals for each poop you collect, and you gotta scoop it in up to a line on the bottle, then MIX it with the built-in spoon on the lid (kind of like the bubbles you buy at the store, with the bubble wand built in to the lid!), and finally, shake it like some obscene cocktail.

Eeeech!! I am not sharing this process with Lily, lest you worry. Why the hell am I sharing it with you? Well, it's just so gross I had to tell somebody. I mean, I have to mix my poop?? If I wasn't nauseated already, I would be from doing this. It just feels wrong, somehow. Like I should be hiding it. If it was my job to mix poop, that would be different.

Anyway, I just couldn't help but notice how different it was for me to deal with my own poop in contrast to Lily's poop. Mine felt dirtier. Why?

Okay, hopefully you aren't all thinking I'm a crazy person. I am sick right now, so that should count for something. When you're sick with some mystery crap (in this case, literally), you get tired of having to do all these weird tests.

Girl in Raspberry Forest

Here's Lily picking raspberries in our backyard. The branches are 6 feet tall.

Wheels!

Here's our little driver on a weekend morning. Cycling in her jammies! She doesn't mind wearing the helmet, either, which is nice. Probably because she's used to it from riding with it when she rides with Daddy.

She's getting to where she'll ride it to the park, about 4 blocks. It makes her feel really good, and it's fun to see her pedaling really hard to get over the bumps, and just go fast. Of course, pedaling home is excruciatingly slow, as you might expect. It makes Mommy and Daddy a little crazy. Especially when she poops out and you have to carry her AND the tricycle. But still.

"said a little voice"

When Lily was playing with her cars today, one car was looking for another one, and she sort of narrated the missing car's dialogue. She said:

" 'I'm in here,' said a little voice."

It was so funny, both John and I were laughing. And hey, that's some complex thinking. My smartie.

We went to the Maul of 'Merica today cuz it was too dang hot to be outside and besides, I wanted to get her some Lego duplos (the toddler size Legos). She found a set that had vehicles from her favorite movie, Cars, and we've been playing with it for hours now at home tonight. It was a $50 set, but I don't get that many new toys (most come from the thrift store) so I figured I'd splurge. She loooooooooooves this set, so I'm happy.

I have been really sick lately so haven't been posting much. It's hard when I feel too crappy to play, so I'm super happy when I feel good and can play with her.

We went to the Nickelodeon Universe amusement park in the middle of the Maul and went on some rides. We're not into Nick so we don't know all the characters and I resent them because they replaced Camp Snoopy. I mean, The Kite-Eating Tree will always be The Kite-Eating Tree. I don't care if they paint it to be the Backyardigans Swing-Along. It's still The Kite-Eating Tree. So there.

But we had fun on the rides. Lily is just a smidge away (okay, an inch) from the first big cutoff for rides at 39". So we went on the Merry-Go-Round, a pint-sized roller coaster, a car on a crazy track that whipped us around the corners, a nice train that didn't do anything crazy, and this funny little bus that goes up and down on a big hydraulic lift. Lily had fun, and I had a lot of fun, too. I was screaming just to be silly, and then on the bus ride, when it stops at the top before changing direction, I was like "Oh no, we're stuck!" and the kids in front of me turned around and looked very worried for a second or two. It's fun to ham it up when you're a Mom. Kids are not the only ones who can ham it up!

It's probably a good thing we couldn't go on any big rides yet, I'd probably yak and that would be the end of our fun.