Three poops, five baths

I don't write much about poop anymore. Not because our younger two children poop less than the older ones, but because the older ones set the bar pretty high. Not that Corinna grabbing handfuls of her poop during a diaper change isn't entertaining, but we've already done that. (Besides, an impartial third party would probably say that me yelling for Rachel to come immobilize her hands to keep her from smearing it all over, while I finish cleaning the other end, is actually the most entertaining part of that.)

We start off this afternoon with Rachel handing me Corinna and lying down for a nap. Corinna decided that this was her cue to poop so hard that it came up her front all the way to her chest. No problem for an experienced dad. I start the bathwater, then disturb Rachel to get a new outfit. I've got the new diaper, the onesie, the pants, the towel, and I scrub Corinna off in the tub. When she's all clean I let her splash in the water for a minute. She looks up at me, grins, and lets fly again. I snatch her out of the water as the brown cloud spreads out.

Corinna gets her second bath in ten minutes, in the sink. I drain the bathtub and have Matthew clean it with Clorox wipes. He is not amused.

Fast forward to tonight. Isaac is bathed and has his night-time diaper on under his pajamas. I'm talking with Rachel and Christine in the family room. Isaac runs in and babbles something at me. It doesn't really register. He babbles again, urgently. I still don't understand what he's saying, but I look at him and see that his pants are missing. "Tu as fait caca?" [Did you poop?] Isaac nods and runs back to the bathroom. As he does I see a brown clod of poop stuck to his thigh. "Rachel," I announce, "this one's yours."

Rachel accepts that as fair, and follows our son. "It's all over!" she yells. "Oh, no! What did you do to the toilet!?"

It's a two-person job. So as I'm on my hands and knees cleaning up his tracks with Clorox wipes (indispensable in this household, I'm afraid), and Rachel has Isaac with his legs in the air in the bathtub, spraying him down with the shower attachment, she laughs and tells me, "Who would have thought that the fruit of our love would be so unromantic?"

I didn't mention that Isaac's first bath was due to having discovered Matthew's valentines day candy stash, and spreading flavored sugar from the dipping sticks all over his bed. The bed was green and so was the bathwater when I was done scrubbing. This was also the source of his third bath: poop cleaned up, we set to changing the sheets so we could bed him down for the night. Isaac enthusiastically wrapped himself in the blanket... which turned out to have the largest reservoir of sugar left in it.

Now it is quiet. Isaac usually fights bedtime tooth and nail but perhaps tonight he senses that mom and dad have had enough.