Saturday, April 5, 2008

How NOT to check for a poopy diaper

I’ve already related to you some of the horror stories of my travels. Pissy train employees, long layovers, sick kids, family feuds, fatigue etc. So I want you to keep those issues in mind and consider their influence on my state of mind as I relate this next tale to you.

We were sitting in the Chicago train terminal during our 4 hour layover. I still smell like vomit, I’m tired and approximately 300 people have lined up around our little makeshift camp of suitcases, empty Happy Meals and baby paraphernalia to board an earlier train.

I begin to notice the not so subtle odor of human feces. Now there are 3 options as to the source of this smell. It’s either my kid, my niece, or one of the 300 people whose asses are currently at nose level. I ask Matt “who stinks?” which as all mothers know translates into – “hey check our kid’s pants for poop and change them if they’re dirty, please My Love”. Well obviously he needs to brush up on his Mom/Wife-ese because all he did was shrug his shoulders (I’ll admit, it’s a complex language with several dialects, but you’d think after dating for 6 years and being married for almost 8 he’d have a little more mastery of it).

So I haul the kid up off the floor and proceed with the “smell the pants for evidence of crap” maneuver. However, I made a fatal error during this maneuver; I didn’t look first. I don’t’ know where I was looking, perhaps my eyes were glazed over with fatigue, but I didn’t look where my nose was going and it was all too obvious when I felt the sensation of warm goo on the tip of my nose, that it was indeed my child’s diaper that stunk. Yes, she had diarrhea and it had traveled up out of the diaper and onto her back and some of it was now deposited on the tip of my nose. It was a proud moment.

After the panic subsided I tried to calmly assess my options. I was holding a child’s ass in my face and there was feces on my nose, and I’m in the middle of a crowded train station. I do not have a free hand to procure a Kleenex or other substance to wipe my nose off, nor do I want to remove the child and hand her to someone else because then my shitty nose will be exposed for all to see. So I did the only thing I could think of. I wiped it on the back of her shirt. After all it had poop on it in other places already and would need to be changed anyway. After that it was a pretty normal diaper change, except that the other women in the bathroom looked at me a little strangely when I stuck my entire face under the faucet and washed it with enough anti-bacterial soap to disinfect an entire elephant.

2 comments:

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Aunt Becky said...

Oh dude. Dude. Dude. That sucks.

And I've done similar things. But damn. That's ROUGH!