Salad Tongs and Prune Juice

Saturday I noticed Gwen assuming her standard all fours pooping position and as I’m making a mental note to pass this one off on Matt since he’s watching football and I’m doing dishes, my inner musings are interrupted by her sudden crying.

Now as a parent you learn the cries. There’s the “I’m tired but don’t really want to sleep” cry, the “My brother has just taken my toy and/or hit me in the head” cry, the “There’s really nothing wrong with me but I feel like crying” cry (my personal favorite), and then there’s the dreaded: “Something is seriously wrong and I’m freaked out and in a lot of pain” cry, and this was the one I was hearing.

Now she’s been constipated the last week or so and her stools have been pretty solid so I anticipated that perhaps she was having some difficulty – and boy was she. Picture this. We’ve got her on the living room floor. I’m stroking her forehead and cooing in an effort to calm her. Matt’s got the back end and he’s trying everything to get this massive turd out of the poor girl. He’s bicycling her legs, squeezing her butt cheeks, trying to grasp the thing (with a wet wipe on his hand of course). Several scenarios are running through my head – should we take her to the ER? No, too drastic, how about some salad tongs? – if we could just get a hold of it we could pull it out. No too dangerous, plus then I’d have to buy a new pair of salad tongs, and as I’m just deciding that the best option is to run a warm bath and have her soak in it in the hopes it would break up the poop, Matt yells, “Here it comes” and sure enough it was starting to move. I’m holding her hand saying “push, honey push” Matt’s guiding it out, wet wipe in hand and when the entire load was finally out, all three of us shared an exhale of relief and satisfaction.

It’s almost a pity that she’s too young to remember it because if she’s unfortunate enough to have inherited my narrow pelvis and birth canal, it may have been the closest experience to child birth she’ll ever have.