Welcome to our blog. My husband and I will invite you along on our journey in marriage, children, and middle age. John will be writing the Daddy view, and I'll tell the right view ... mine. With life as chaotic as it is with a toddler, we can not promise posts every day, but we will at least post once a week.
As a mother, every day is a challenge and every day is a learning experience. But I never realized just how much I learned from my toddler until he taught me that there is more than one way to catch shit...
One evening my husband and I were giggling as we watched our little guy play in the bath. We had just washed him and he had decided that Momma and Dadda needed a bath too. So the splashing ensued. We were having so much fun watching as he splashed over and over with such enthusiasm and vigor. And then he stopped. The water stopped flying through the air. Suddenly, the room was still.
Bubbles started to rise out of the bath tub at an alarming rate. His backside temporarily looked like it was in a hot tub turned to full blast. "Oh God", I thought. "He's gonna poo!". Panic stricken I began barking orders, after all isn't that what Mom's do? "Pick him up!", I yelled, "Don't let him poo in the tub, then we'll have to wash him again". As if having to refill the tub with clean water and rewash our baby would somehow be the undoing of the world as we know it. After all, we are in a drought. Somehow, this one feat would undo all of the water wasting crimes this household has ever committed. Lifting our toddler out of the tub was the key to our pardon.
Like a good soldier, my husband quickly picked him up, no questions asked...verbally. And then there was the stare. It was the "now what" stare. I saw the fear. He looked like a deer in the headlights; eyes wide and glossy, mouth slightly open, not daring to breath. "Bring him into the play room and get a diaper on him" I ordered. Now, sitting in your comfy chair, laughing at my expense, you may have wondered why I didn't have John hold the little Poopie Monster over the toilet (which incidentally was right next to the bath tub). Let me just say, its true that you never know what you'll do in any given situation until you are there. Unfortunately, in my panicked state the thought never occurred to me. I just knew that diapers catch poo, and I needed one now.
So there we were, my husband holding our baby up while I fumbled with the diaper, the Poopie Monster straining to accomplish his mission to the best of his ability. PLOP! There it went. Right onto the carpet. A little poopie just staring back at us, flaunting our failure in front of us. Shit happened, and we didn't know what to do.
Had I been prepared for the unexpected, I would have realized that there is more than one way to catch and contain poo. Yes the diaper works wonders most of the time, but why didn't I think of the toilet? I mean isn't our goal to eventually get him to do his business in the toilet anyway? I was so caught off guard that I couldn't think of any other solution.
When life throws problems your way, there are typically multiple ways to deal with it. You can panic, like I did and have a life full of shit, or you can prepare yourself and think of ways to contain it. Did you get passed up for that all important promotion? Maybe you should ask your supervisor what they are looking for and work toward that goal. Perhaps you need to bite the bullet and finish that college degree. Or maybe it is as simple as letting people know that you are interested in the position and giving more face time in the office. Or perhaps you can volunteer for the "shit jobs". That way you have control of the shit that runs into your life and you can better contain it than if it were flung at you like a monkey would do in a zoo. Plus you gain promotion points in the eyes of your supervisors when you volunteer for the jobs no body wants.
You can't run from life's problems. They will always find you. The trick is to find multiple solutions to a problem and work toward those solutions to contain the problem. If one solution doesn't work, try another. Keep trying, keep learning, and keep preparing, and maybe all of the shit in your life will be contained in a nice, neat, no mess, no smell diaper pail.
