The poop. Oh the poop.

Though I started this blog with a horrifying poop story, there have actually been relatively few blog-worthy poop events in the last few months.  That was.... until last Sunday.

The day started innocently enough, but notably without the standard morning dirty pants from Chester.  We went about our day, and after an early lunch, I thought briefly about the lack of poop.  If for some reason Chester doesn't fill his pants immediately upon waking, he does it quite reliably after breakfast, and at the very latest, following lunch.  But on this day, nothing, though I didn't have much time to linger on the child's lack of scheduled poop, as we had an exciting pirate birthday party to attend! 

CR turned three this week, and his Mommy scheduled a party at Malltots, one of my favorite indoor playgrounds.  We started the party in the private party room.  Everyone loved the pirate cake and snacks, enjoyed taking turns with the pinata, and then headed out into the common play area to ride on Cozy Coupes, climb on the pirate ship and jump in the bouncy houses.   

After focusing on Pete for a few minutes, I headed back over to Chester.  I could see that he had fastened himself in the police car with the seatbelt.  Buckling his own seatbelt is a new skill that can keep him occupied for hours, though he has yet to learn to un-buckle them and can get a little frustrated!  You'll find all of the booster seatbelts clipped, which can be quite frustrating if you try to put him in the seat for dinner before un-clipping the straps.  But I digress, back to the situation at hand.  Chester was strapped into the police car and was headed for hysterical, bouncing in the seat as high as his seatbelt would let him, then sitting back down to wail before stretching against the seatbelt again. 

Though it was highly amusing to watch him struggle against the seatbelt, I decided to free him and let him find another car to buckle himself into so we could repeat the catch and release process a few more times before he moved on to riding a tricycle down the slide or pushing a lawn mower up the plank of the pirate ship.  I was probably 10 feet away when I smelled something.  Hoping it was one of the other babies in the playground, and not mine, I was totally unprepared for what I saw when I got closer.  Chester had pooped.  And the repeated actions of straining against the seatbelt and then slamming back down to a sitting position had propelled the poop up and out of his diaper, out the top of his shorts, up his back, out of his shirt and on the police car.  I'm not talking about just a little bit, either. 

My first thought was to take him and leave, but as I picked him up from the police car, the poop spread all over me, and now Chester's hair, socks and arms too.  I quickly determined that he could not go in his car seat like this.  Holding him as far from me as possible, I pushed the car over to the attendant, alerted her to the fact that we had a situation, and headed for the bathrooms. 

Two things dawned on me as I carried the stinker across the floor.  First, thank God the party was at Malltots, where my other child is completely contained on age-appropriate toys, and the other parents at the party could keep an eye on him for me while I attended to the disaster.    Second, thank God for friends like LW who saw us both covered in poop and instead of gagging, came with me to the bathroom to help.  We removed his shoes, which was the only article of clothing that had escaped the poop, and put his shirt, shorts and socks into a ziplock baggie.  Totally good luck that I had used the ziplock baggie to protect my purse from the sweat of the frozen water bottle I carried around hat day.  It probably took 30 minutes and 50 wet and soapy paper towels to remove all the poop from the rest of Chester's body.  Then we put a new diaper on him, replaced his shoes and turned him loose to play while I cleaned myself up too. 

Here comes the super-mom moment, don't you wish you could be as well-prepared as me?  I had long ago stopped carrying a separate diaper bag.  I toss a diaper and some wipes in a travel case and tuck them into my purse.  (I've given up cloth diapering when we leave the house, I'm only partially crunchy)  But I do carry a spare change of clothes for the boys in the car, and clearly this time we needed it!  Not only that, but a few days before we'd been to a friend's house and I had packed MYSELF a spare change of clothes, in case we decided to play in the water outside with the boys.  I left the boys with our friends, and dashed out to the car, changed my shirt in the back of the van, and brought in clean clothes for Chester too.  It may not have been the adorable black satin party top I was rocking originally at the party, but the grey wrinkled t-shirt was clean and free from the unmistakable odor of child-poop.  Check that out:  At nearly two years old, we survived a poosplosion at a birthday party and came away unscathed.  Yes, I'm that good (I mean lucky and blessed with great friends).

After attending to the crisis, we actually ended up staying for another two hours.  Pete found a friend with almost his exact birthday, and they played beautifully together.  Chester played in another Cozy Coupe, the firetruck one this time, since the police car had been whisked away to be sanitized, or possibly burned.  I haven't been back since, but I'm hoping that there's no pictures of my children at the entrance with big red Xs across them indicating we've been banned from Malltots, especially because I'd like to host our next birthday party there too!

Happy birthday C, we're glad you invited us to your pirate party!