When the Sweet Potatoes Hit the Fan

You know those days when so much goes haywire, you can't really do anything but be flexible and try to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all? Yeah, that was my Tuesday.

Here's what my day was supposed to look like: My mom and siblings were scheduled to arrive from Tucson for a day visit at 10:00am. Devin was at work with our one-and-only car, so I would borrowed Mom's van in order to visit my friend Jamie (who just had a sweet baby girl and also has a cute little man who is 18-months-old). Obviously, arriving with my twins in-tow would severely impede my ability to assist Jamie, so my eager-to-babysit family gave me the perfect opportunity for a visit and for some snuggle time with the wee newborn babe. After Jamie's, I would return home and enjoy dinner with my mom and siblings before they headed back to Tucson. Sounds nice and neat don't it?

This is what happened instead: Mom calls at ten-til-ten to inform me that due to my siblings' (ages 15, 10, and 9) ineptitude at getting ready on time, they would now be forty-five minutes late. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but when you are trying to catch the twins while they are happy and awake, there is only a two-hour window in the mid-morning, and my family would now miss forty-five minutes of that time. Mom is livid.

Mom calls back ten minutes later in tears. She has a flat tire on the side of the highway, cars are speeding by like bats out of you-know-where and no one is even slowing down to a reasonable, "I'll try not to kill you" speed, let alone stopping to help. She'll call me back.

When she does, forty-five minutes have passed and she is now on the side of the road again with a second flat tire. You've got to be kidding me. She's waiting for a tow truck and will keep me updated.

Meanwhile, the twins are ready for lunch. Isaac, who is our champion eater but has refused baby food for the past few days, is finally chowing down on his sweet potatoes. After lunch, I set the twins down to play while I make a long-over-due meal for myself. Just as I take the first delicious bite of my sandwich, I hear Isaac throwing up. Great. Sandwich down, I go to Isaac and discover piles and piles of sweet potato chunks where he was playing. Super.

However, as I grab him up from the mess, I realize that the sweet potatoes are all over his legs and in fact coming out of his diaper. Oh crap. Literally - I've got a major poop-spolsion on my hands (and I do mean on my hands), all over my baby and all over my carpet. Then it dawns on me - I heard him throw up. Oh sweet mercy, did the baby eat his own poop??!! A quick examination of his month confirms that he did not. Well thank goodness - that's something.

I rush to the bathroom to hose down the poopy mess that is my child, but then remember that I have twins and the other one is crawling around unattended in the next room.  Still holding Isaac, I shut off the water, rush back to the living room and spin around in a confused circle between the twins as I try to decide what to do. Finally, I set Isaac back down on the floor- far enough away from the poop that he won't get a second chance to ingest it, but still on the carpet, which left more droppings to clean up and still made a feces feast available to my child (fortunately, he did not take advantage of the poop buffet before him). Plop goes Weston goes into the exersaucer, and I awkwardly scoop up Isaac while trying not to get any more infant excreta on my person.

I strip down the odorous culprit and put him in the bathtub. He happily plays, oblivious to my plight. Pulling out the diaper sprayer, I rinse out the unbelievably nasty cloth diaper into the toilet and seriously question my choice to cloth diaper. I wash up the baby, dry him off, re-clothe him and bring him back to the living room to play with his brother.

With a sigh, I spy my sandwich across the room - perfectly poised on the plate with one bite removed  and beckoning me to partake in its deliciousness once more. And then I remember - there are still piles of baby poop to clean up. Six piles to be exact. Piles that look like chunky sweet potatoes and smell like death. Terrific.

Out come the rags, the baking soda, the vinegar and the scrub brush, and I turn another round of confused circles as I hesitantly try to figure out the best way to clean up the filth. I'll spare you more details about that process, but suffice to say it was disgusting.

I grab the sordid rags, the soiled towel and sullied baby clothes and toss them onto the washing machine to deal with later. Ironically, today is laundry day and I have completed this chore just moments before the catastrophe. Fantastic.

Baby cleaned, mess cleaned, Mom and siblings on their way via tow truck, and stomach still empty, I call my friend to cancel my visit. Disappointingly, there is no way that's happening now. I finally get to eat my sandwich (which is considerably less appetizing after all the mess). I shrug and think to myself, Well that's life...and it's only 12:30.

Follow Up: It's the next day, and the Forth of July. We are on our way to our friends' house for a party and fireworks. Isaac projectile vomits in the car which results in Devin cleaning up the car seat with baby wipes in the Wendy's parking lot while Weston screams like a banshee and I attempt to clean Isaac up in the Wendy's bathroom were there are no paper towels and no baby changing station. Yeah, that was fun. But, at least I managed to snap a twin picture before Isaac's half of the patriotic paraphernalia was sabotaged (I say "sabotaged" because it seems that a good majority of the days which I dress the twins alike, one of them protests the wearing of matching outfits by whatever means available to him. Usually in the form of spit up, vomit, explosive poop or impressively wet diapers.)

And that's life.