This surely rivals Leta's best

If you're a regular Dooce reader, surely you remember this famous Leta poop story. The spaghetti and meatballs. The poop smeared into her eyebrows. The bathwater they had to keep changing because it kept turning brown. Every mother of a child in diapers who read that story shuddered and thought, that's as bad as it gets, poopwise. SURELY that's as bad as it gets.

Well. Let me tell you.

Aislinn was in her Johnny Jump-up, which hangs in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. Audrey and I were bonding over a 25-piece jigsaw puzzle, when I realized Aislinn was getting extremely excited in her jumping. I glanced over, and my first thought was that she had thrown up in the doorway. And yet...she had not had solid food since the night before, when Leo fed her squash for the first time (the bright ORANGE squash, don't you know). Surely there was none of that left in her stomach at 1 p.m. the next day.

And in the five seconds I sat frozen watching her bounce more and more maniacally in this orange...STUFF, it dawned on me. This was not vomit. It was POOP. (Though I don't know why poop is worse than vomit, it just is, IT IS!) And she was DANCING IN IT.

Finally, mommy drive kicked in after getting stuck in another gear (probably suspended disbelief), and I whisked her out of the seat. My first thought was "bathtub", because, well, that's where I usually take her to get clean. But baths for babies in this house tend to involve mommy climbing in with baby, since the original baby in the house hated baths, and we don't have a baby bathtub anymore (so mommy HAS to get in to hold up babies who aren't sitting up by themselves yet). And there was NO. FREAKING. WAY. I was climbing in a bathtub with poop. So I backed out of the bathroom and ran to the kitchen sink, which was, thankfully, empty at the moment. Also fortunately, I recently unclogged the sprayer, so I turned it on full force at her lower half. This was BEFORE I took any of her clothes off, mind you. After feet, legs, and outer clothing were poop-free, I pulled her shorts off, and opened the diaper to see how much was in it.

Maybe a tablespoon of poop actually stayed in the diaper. There was ten times that amount, easily, in the doorway. How this happened, I don't know. I do know that I have had to wash the cloth seat of her Super Saucer three times now because this is not the first such blowout she's had (only the worst). But even in those instances, there was still far more poop IN THE DIAPER than outside. As it should be.

What followed was more rinsing and spraying, which Miss Aislinn tolerated fairly well, considering she had never been bathed in the kitchen sink before, let alone attacked with the sprayer, and also considering the water never got warmer than 70 degrees (THERE WAS NO TIME!).

The rest of the afternoon was spent scraping up poop with an old spoon from the kitchen, and then spraying Woolite Pet Stain formula onto the orange spot, letting it sit, then scrubbing and blotting. And repeating the spraying, waiting, and scrubbing and blotting over and over.

I finally gave up. There is still an obvious stain, and a lingering smell, mixed with the smell of the Woolite. I might try some more tomorrow, since we have people coming over for cake and ice cream in honor of Miss Audrey (who ALWAYS warned me about her blowout poops with explosive gas beforehand). Or I may let Leo take a turn (fair's fair, after all...he's the one that fed her the squash!). Or I may just throw a towel down over it all and say to my guests "Look at my innovative new throw rug! What's that? A smell? Ummmm...Leo must have forgotten to clean the litterbox. LEO!"