My Gorgeous Gal, who will be 3 in May, has recently started taking herself off to the toilet and can complete the whole process independently (yay!) as long as she's not wearing tricky buttoned shorts etc. This is usually A Good Thing.
Today, notsomuch.
While I was out at the clothesline earlier this afternoon, I heard a very upset GG call me in. So I head inside and ask her, "What happened?".
"I spilled some poo-poo".
I had initially been a little sun-dazzled when I walked inside, and couldn't see properly, so I thought to myself, "Oh, no worries, I'll just pick up the poo, and grab some of those nifty disinfectant floor wipes I found at the shops."
What lay before me when I rounded the corner into the bathroom will give the non-parents reading (if they made in this far, in fact) nightmares. GG had obviously eaten something that didn't agree with her, and had, being the very good girl she is, taken herself to the loo to take care of the situation. The fact she didn't quite make it is not her fault. The fact that half her digestive tract exploded all over the toilet and adjoining powder room floor is not her fault. Nonetheless, this incident scared her, and what do 2 year old little girls do when they're scared?
Yep....
They run away...
Down the (carpeted) hallway.
Sigh.
So here's the situation before me... GG, who I can now see has runny poos running down her leg, standing in the bathroom, pointing at a sight straight out of a Steven King novel. She's also pretty upset.
I assure GG it's okay, it's not her fault, don't worry, we'll sort it out and clean it up, lickety-split. all while I am thinking "How on Earth am I going to clean this up, where do I even start? Screw it, we'll have to move."
So I pick GG up and hover-carry her into the bath, hose her off with one of those little rubber hose things, put her in the shower while I clean the bath, run a bath, put her in that to splash and play while I spot-spray the carpet, use a forest worth of paper towel wiping up the floor, door, behind the door (WTF!??! How'd it get there?), toilet bowl, behind the toilet bowl, sling the bathmat into some Napi-San, clean the carpet, disinfect the aforementioned surfaces, mop the floor and shower floor for good measure.
You know what really freaks me out?
That none of this freaked me out. I mean, isn't that just a little bit weird? Before kids, I wasn't exactly prissy - I remember being half-way through assisting a vet operating to spay a collie and asking to go to lunch when we were done - but cleaning a poo-covered room would definitely have rated on my gag-ometer. Now, nuthin'.
I have been de-sensitised by the cumulative bucketloads of bodily functions I have had thrown up on me, leaked onto me and squirted at me. They start you off with those (comparatively) innocuous newborn poos and milky vom-voms and gradually get you to the point where vomit all over your sheepskin underlay is a minor annoyance in your day (another story - beware of tummy bugs and co-sleeping).
This is obviously evolution at it's best, otherwise the forest would be full of sweet little wee ones being raised by wolves, having been abandoned by their human mummies after their first nappy explosion.
