Poopzilla

I know it may seem like all I blog about is poop, but let's face it, I am a SAHD (stay at home dad) for a three and a half year old and a seven month old so my life really does revolve around poop, pooping, wiping tooshies, poopie diapers, poops at inopportune moments, poop on my hands, poop on my clothes, poop on their clothes, poop on the floor, poop of all shapes, colors and sizes. However just the other day my sweet baby boy took a poop that put all other poops to shame. It was just one of those days where it seemed that all the poop cards were stacked against me. The first poop was an unprepared daddy poop, where he caught me at the pharmacy with no diapers in tow. I should have known better but I tried to squeeze in the stop at CVS on the way home from the gym because I had to pick up a prescription and a few other things, but as soon as I handed my scrip over to the pharmacist he dropped a bomb on me, so I had to abandon my mission and head for home. But that was just a tiny precursor of what was to come at the end of my day. I had just dropped Mommy off at her exercise class and got home with both kids, which sounds easy enough but as soon as mommy got out of the car my three year old daughter started balling saying "I miss my Momma!". We had just picked her up from school and we usually all head home together but traffic was crazy so we just dropped Mommy off...big mistake. So of course with sister crying brother decides to join in the fun and starts crying too. Anyway I managed to get home without crashing and calmed both of them down so I plopped them both downstairs and ran up to get dinner ready. And that is precisely when poopzilla decided to make his appearance. I was maybe upstairs for ten minutes tops, and I had left baby boy in his exersaucer. Well I hear him start to fuss a little bit so I finished up quickly and headed down to discover he had pooped through his diaper, through his clothes, and into the bottom part of the exersaucer. It was absolutely everywhere. I ended up getting him out of there and getting him cleaned up but it was no easy task...poop all over this kid, up to the top of his back and covering his little weiner and all over his belly, hands, legs, and feet. And he was just loving it, pretty much giggling and laughing through the entire cleaning process, and needless to say I wasn't. I wouldn't be surprised if his next word turned out to be motherf#*ker. Anyway he was clean and I cleaned myself up...I did have to change my poopstained shirt...and we rejoined sister in the family room. That's when I remembered he had pooped all over the exersaucer too so I took that apart and threw the washable part in the laundry, only to realize that the bottom of the exersaucer has holes in the bottom and the poop had also ended up in a nice little puddle on the floor. Like I said, it was just one of those days!

Hoarder

My family and I are finally going to try and make the move out of our two bedroom condo and into a bigger place, hopefully a nice single family home somewhere on the edge of the city. Our condo is just getting smaller and smaller as these kids keep getting bigger and bigger, especially baby boy who just gets fatter everyday. And we are on the verge of moving baby boy out of our room and in with his sister, which I just don't think will work out very well. Although we have ferberized the little man he still likes to get up at the crack, and sometimes earlier, and I don't know how big sister will deal with that interruption of her beauty sleep. So we're hoping this move will happen sooner than later and we find a new home where each kiddo gets their own room, but it all depends on our ability to get this condo sold as soon as possible. My first order of business is to get this place ready to show, which is no easy task. We just have a lot of stuff, between all the things my wife and I have accumulated over the years and all the junk these two kids have amassed in their short lives, it is a ton of stuff. So first thing this morning after dropping my three year old off at school I came home and started tearing up the closet under the stairs, which is the most dreaded closet we have, just packed to the gills. Now I've had my suspicions in the past that my wife might be a hoarder, but this morning I think my suspicions turned right into reality. I don't think I need to call A&E Television because she has yet to bury us alive, but there are certain things which she just refuses to let go. It all started about five months ago when my brother and his family came up from St. Louis to meet the new addition, and my sister in law volunteered to help try and organize our home. We were in that very closet under the stairs when my brother discovered my daughter's first Easter basket, which he promptly put into the junk pile, and my wife threw a conniption fit. Neither my brother or I could understand why a two dollar basket from CVS could be so important, but she was not having any of it, and at one point I actually thought she was going to punch him in the nose. She first claimed it was an important part of our daughter's childhood that we had to keep, and when that argument didn't work she told my brother and I both that we just did not love Jesus. Being Jewish I told her flat out I love Jesus as much as the next Jew from Jersey who happened to be married to a beautiful shiksha, but she would not relent. That's when I knew my wife was a hoarder. We did end up using the basket again this past Easter for my daughter so her hoarding did end up saving us a few bucks, but this morning her need to hoard reared its ugly head again in full force. One of the first things I dragged out of that very same closet this morning was an old bag of baby toys. And these were the second string toys, if they were really cool at all they would have been put back into the rotation when baby boy came, but instead they have been just sitting in the closet collecting dust. But when I immediately put them in my Salvation Army pile, little wifey came sniffing around. "What do you think you're doing with those?" she said. I informed her that they were going to charity and the hoarding gene kicked right on. She actually pulled out an old maraca and started to tear up, "this is just really emotional for me, giving away all our baby stuff" she said. So I very calmly told her we actually have a real live baby sleeping upstairs and I'm not giving him away, but this junk has got to go! She actually thought that was kind of funny so we had a laugh and I told her we would get her all the help she needs for her hoarding tendencies. And she laughed and smiled and told me to f off!

No Mo

My wife and I decided that we are not going to have any more kids, two is enough. Actually my wife decided and since she is the one that has to carry them around for ten months and lose her incredible figure for that whole time, I really don't have much say in the matter. And we did get extremely lucky having a girl and a boy so we really couldn't ask for more. But our little guy is six months old now and already starting to hit all the usual milestones, he is sitting up, eating real food, rolling over, and talking. And much to my delight his first blatherings were "Dadadadadadadada", unlike my daughter whose first word was dog, and we don't even have a dog! But as he reaches all these momentous occasions in his young life I already find myself thinking, wow, this is it, no more baby stuff. And although it is an incredible amount of work the baby stuff is really fun, just being able to plop them down on the bed and squeeze them or stare at them or just watch them sleep. I remember when my daughter was born about three and a half years ago my parents and grandparents came in from Jersey and literally stared at her for four days straight, just being absolutely tickled when she would crack a little smile, burp or make that cute I'm pooping face. She was the first grandchild on my side of the family and the first girl born into my side of the family in quite a while, but four days of staring is a lot. Now when my son came along six months ago my parents came back into town and the staring began again, only this time with a crazy happy three year old big sister to contend with as well. But having a baby in the house is just really awesome, this little creature that just completely depends on you, it changes everything. I guess I'm getting a little sappy here but now I see what might really be happening...soon this little baby boy will be crawling and then walking and then running...and then I'll have two monsters to contend with!

Sausage

I've talked before about how wonderfully plump my baby boy is, but at six months old now we may have achieved peak fatness...so much so that the whole family has taken to calling him the sausage. My three year old daughter has particularly embraced the name and really will call him nothing else, except on occasion the little sausage, sausage man, or just fatty fatty. We just had his six month check up with our doctor and he weighed in at a whopping 20 pounds 7 ounces and measured 27 and a half inches long. He came into this world at 7 pounds 10 ounces so in six short months he's gained about thirteen pounds. Not too shabby. He's not obese or anything close to that, just very zoftic. So referring to him as the little sausage has just come naturally, and everyone seems to get a kick out of it. Now his clothes have even become his sausage casing and his car seat has become his bun! He is just so soft and squishy I love it, and he really loves to be naked in all his sausagey glory which is a fantastic sight. I'm sure as he starts to move around more and learns to crawl some of his glorious fatness might start to disappear, but for now he is our family's sausage man, and we wouldn't have him any other way.

Miss Independent

As of late my three year old daughter is really becoming quite the independent young lady...she just insists on doing everything by herself. It started off with the potty, where she no longer wanted daddy to help her up onto the bowl or wipe, which I must say is not half bad. But I still have to get in there after one of her ginormous poops or else she is walking around itching her bottom all day. At this point she doesn't even use her stool but likes to climb up all by herself just holding the toilet paper roll, which I'm sure one day will simply give way and she'll take a header right into the toilet... I should probably reinforce that thing. Her budding independence is not limited to potty time, she is also making her mark in the kitchen, helping out with baby brother, getting into and out of her carseat, taking off and putting on her own clothes and shoes, helping daddy with the laundry, climbing into and out of her stroller, and tackling all the big kid stuff at the park (no more baby swings for her). It is really awesome that she is learning to do all these things on her own and I am fully encouraging her independence, but on the same note it kind of makes me sad that my sweet little baby girl is already trying to grow up. It also makes me kind of sad that all the things I mentioned above went from taking five seconds to accomplish to taking forever!!

From Zero to Stinky : The Evolution of Poop

WARNING: This blog may contain material not suitable for people with weak stomachs or people with an overly sensitive sense of smell!

It all starts with that stuff that resembles what your dad used to use to repave the driveway with when you were a kid, the black tar poops. I remember when my daughter was born and we were in the hospital freaking out when I first saw that stuff come out of my new baby girls tiny little tooshie. And then trying to change my first diaper with her bottom covered in that stuff, it was like glue, and I was so nervous if I wiped to hard I could hurt her...it was just a mess, literally. Now six months ago my son came along and although I was way more confident in my poop changing abilities, but that didn't make getting that tar poops off his little bottom any easier , especially with those two little balls getting in the way. Next comes the mustard seed poops, which don't really carry much of a scent but they just look really weird. Those are the breast milk poops, but when you start throwing a bit of formula into the mix is when things start to get a tad more interesting. It still amazes me how my little baby boy can turn a few measly ounces of formula into a seven pound liquidy caramel poop diaper. My daughter is almost three and a half now and has been potty trained since about three months before her third birthday, and although I don't have to deal with her poop filled diapers anymore, I am the official wipe master. And I have to say my little girl drops some serious bombs, I don't even know how she fits these things out of her tiny little toosh. And the smell, my goodness she turns grilled cheese sandwiches and carrots into the most massive stinky turds you've ever seen...or in my case smelled. But back to baby boy, he is now six months old and onto solid foods, so the evolution of poop continues. We tried to get him to eat that rice cereal and oatmeal stuff about a month ago but he just wasn't having it, so now so far we have given him sweet potatoes and carrots, which he is totally loving. But the poop mass index in those diapers just continue to grow in size and stinkiness as his meals do. For example today he ate a six ounce bottle of formula and a whole jar of the sweet potatoes for lunch and about a half hour later produced what looked exactly the same in his diaper. I probably could have scraped it out and put right back in the jar and no one would know the difference. Well I guess the smell could give it away, and they do smell something fierce. I really only had about a three month window of no diapers between when my daughter was potty trained and my son was born, but that was a sweet three months. Hopefully just about two and a half more years of giant poop filled diapers and I'll be finished with them forever, although I have heard it's harder to potty train boys so maybe three more years. Wow that is an awful lot of poop.

A Phase?

A few weeks ago I wrote about waking up at two in the morning to find my three year old daughter standing creepily at the foot of our bed, well it happened again last night, and it totally freaked me out yet again. Maybe not as bad as the first time but still, slight heart attack. This new wandering episode has coincided with what I'm hoping is a new little "phase" that she is going through. The don't listen to Daddy and say really mean things to Daddy and take three hours to put me to bed at night phase. Okay I'm actually praying it's just a phase because as Popeye would say "I've stands all I can stands and I can't stands no more!" The not listening I'm kind of used to because although she has always been a good girl, she never listened all the time, and the mean things she says sting a little bit, but she is three and just testing the boundaries of her little world. But our nice bedtime routine which has gone from half an hour or forty five minutes to two or two and a half hours is just not going to fly. The routine has actually stayed the same but the past few nights we have just ended up having to repeat it three or four times. My little angel who would never even get out of her bed by herself is now traipsing right out of there before we can even get the door closed. And as every parent knows those precious few hours we get between when the kiddies go to sleep and we go to sleep are pure gold, and absolutely necessary to retain any kind of sanity. So if this isn't a phase we might just have to get her some kind of cage, alright that's a tad extreme but with me staying home and my wife working full time we really need those few hours of alone time each night, a few minutes are just not going to cut it. I guess we shall just have to wait and see what happens...but she was a little sniffly today...maybe a little dose of benadryl?!