Poop & Jelly Beans

If I told you what I was doing this evening between the hours of 6 and 7 in the p.m., you wouldn’t believe me.

Or maybe, if you’re a parent, you would.

I had an unexpected day off from my daily writing job, and so I thought The Babyman and I would have a leisurely day of playing and cleaning.

Instead everything went wrong that could, right down to the moment when my husband called to say he was running errands after work and not to bother with dinner.

At last! I thought. Relief from my most dreaded chore was sure to change the course of the day!

Sadly, I was mistaken. By the time I finally wrestled two nude and wiggly kids into the bath, I was done in. Ready for bed, but with hundreds of words still ahead of me. Deadlines are piling up as I push myself to write as much as possible just in case the threatened strike at my husband’s workplace goes through.

Still, I sighed with relief until my daughter called from the bathroom:

Mom! Babyman’s poopin’!

I rushed into the master bath (no, I don’t sit with them, but I sit on my bed 5 feet away, DON’T JUDGE) and checked. No poop.

Or at least I didn’t see any poop, until the second time she called for me.

I can deal with a lot of grossitude, people. Vomit on me, piss on me, drool on me … I can take it. But shit in the tub makes me loose my … well, my shit.

I hustled them out of the tub while fretting about e.coli and got the boy in bed. I gagged while I cleaned the tub and The Poo took a huge shit on the toilet next to me.

Poop poop and more poop. Gag gag and more gagging.

Finally, I got all the toys out and hauled them downstairs to find my husband had arrived home with—literally—2.5 pounds of jelly beans.

This is a man whose taste for jelly beans rivals that of Ronald Regan. Every six months or so, he replenishes his stash at the mall candy store. I watched as he took the two bags of beans and combined them in one Zip-loc bag.

Then, in slow motion, I watched as he turned the bag upside down to achieve the proper mix of colors and flavors for his jelly bean jar … and 1 million jelly beans spilled on to the kitchen floor.

We started at each other for a minute, and I burst out laughing.

“It’s not funny,” Mr. C groused. He looked crestfallen: His jelly beans! All over the floor!

I shooed him upstairs and got down on my hands and knees to rescue the beans from every corner of the kitchen. I dusted them off and put them, one by one, in a green hobnail bowl.

As I sat on my kitchen floor in my PJs, hands freshly washed clean of my son’s shit and now cupping scads of jelly beans, I thought about how my mother told me there would be days like this, and how I didn’t believe her.

The moral of the story? There’s three, actually: One, when your kid says her brother pooped in the tub, believe her the first time. Two, there is such a thing as too many jelly beans.

And three? You know someone really loves you when they clean your shit out of a bathtub and pick up all your jelly beans off the kitchen floor on their hands and knees.