In the interests of not divulging too much personal information about my children, lest they become famous and my blog becomes famous and we are all so famous dah-ling, I have been thinking I really shouldn’t, you know, overshare.  About them.  At least not until they are old enough to understand the implications of, and consent to putting information out there on the interwebby, that they may later become entangled in.  But its almost 8.30pm, I’ve been at a Christmas party and consumed some cheer, and The Agony of Christmas is about to start.  It’s on the ABC and therefore has no ads to type within.

So “stiff shit” as they say in the classics.  Although this is a tale of shit that was anything but stiff.

*****

When our second child, who for the purposes of this story we shall call Coco, was a baby, she was a little tricky.  Some days she would cry.  A lot.  And some days she just needed to be held, or she would scream.  A lot.  If you are a RR you will know she has a weird-arse condition that means she requires regular blood transfusions, and so I guess that’s why she was tricky.  Either that or she was a little shit.

But this is not a story about that, this is a story about bodily functions.

We were out doing the food shopping, back in the days before Coles online was available in our sleepy Sunrise town.  The shopping was done, and it was time for Coco to have a nap.  Instead of rushing home, we thought it would be awfully chic to have a coffee at a cute little cafe, and have her drift off to sleep in her baby capsule.  We were intent on not letting the fact that we were now mulitparous ruin our life, despite volumes of evidence to the contrary.

I gave her a little kiss, smiled at her beatifically, pulled the shroudy/blankety thing over the capsule, and began gently rocking her.  She gurgled and snuffled and grunted a little, as babies often do, and I sighed in the contented way that only a mother of a pigeon-pair of perfect children can.  I’m pretty sure the sun was slowly setting behind me, illuminating me in my glow, bathing me in soft warm light.  I suspect I have never looked or felt so smug serene as I sipped my decaf-skinny-chai-soy-latte.  (Yeah right, kids weren’t ruining our life- who drinks that?)

Coco started to grizzle a little, so I rocked her with more vigour.  She could be a bit challenging to settle sometimes, so I rocked a little more.  She started to ramp it up a bit more, so I rocked a bit more. Ramp. Rock. Ramp. Rock.  Until eventually I was standing up, legs apart, holding those handles and swinging her side to side like The Pirate Ship Ride at the Melbourne Show in 1986.  UpUpUp one way, almost to inversion, then DownDownDown.  UpUpUp the other way, then DownDownDown.  I almost wanted to go all the way like that water-in-the-bucket trick we did when we were kids, but I didn’t (What’s wrong with that?  She was strapped in).

Eventually the grizzle>cry>scream was so loud there was nothing for it but to break the rule of the latest parenting book I was reading, and pull back the muslin.  “I won’t get eye contact,” I said to myself- there was something in it about no eye contact- something about being manipulated by a baby.

I whisked that blankie back, and like a magician revealing his trick, I saw that Coco was, well, Cocoa.  Totally brown.

Completely, utterly and absolutely covered in shit.

It was impossible not to get eye contact, for in fact her shocked blue eyes were the only things recognisable as human, in this baby capsule poo bath.

She was basted from head to hand, torso to toe, in runny, lukewarm baby diarrhoea.  I have never seen so much poo in my life, nor do I ever wish to. Nobody does. Nobody should have to. It’s not human.

I didn’t know what to do with all that shit, didn’t know how I would clean it up, just did.not.know.where.to.start.  Where can you start?  When you are in a cafe.  And you have maybe twenty baby wipes.  And you have a kind of gurlgly-screaming baby who looks like a runny Chicco.

So I just dropped that poozy Jacuzzi and ran.

That’s okay, right?