Dan and I babysat for the in-laws Friday night, so they could go out, just the two of them, something I don’t think they’ve done in probably years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the best way to sum up the evening was that it served as a very good reminder to take my birth control. That’s not to say it wasn’t kind of fun, in a crazy experiment kind of way!
So when we got there we were informed that Dan’s 3 year old brother had not pooped in about 5 days, and they had spent the better part of the day trying to will it out of him. My mother-in-law had the little guy running all over the back yard, hoping to give his excretory system that final little push it needed, so that we wouldn’t have to deal with it when the evening came. I truly appreciated her thoughtful efforts, however unsuccessful they were.
I should mention that my husband is the 2nd oldest of 10 children, so we were there to baby-sit the six youngest, at the ages of 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, and 12 (I think…, I may be a little off on a few of the older ones, it’s very difficult to keep track of all their ages.) So you can imagine the chaos that is this household, especially to a girl, such as me, used to a quiet little existence of TV and take-out with her handsome husband and snuggly pup.
The night went like this. Dan played video games with the older boys (who don’t really need a babysitter, but who are, at the same time, not entirely comfortable taking care of the three youngest), and kept an eye on the littlest one, the baby girl, who is the best damn baby I have ever met. Keeping an eye, in this sense, meant that he put her on his lap when she got herself in any trouble, all the while continuing to play Mario Tennis. I had promised the 5 year old girl that I would play Barbies, so I went upstairs with her and her older sister and we broke out the Barbie house and the Barbie jeep. At some point I went downstairs to take a phone call, and discovered that our three year old little poop camel was standing in the middle of the family room, in a very odd position, making some very unusual faces. A peek in his Spiderman underpants found that it was finally coming out, whether he wanted it to or not. Yuck. So I brought him to the bathroom where all hell commenced to break loose. There was screaming, there was crying, he had forgotten to aim his “peeer”down and all the pushing was making things come out of both ends. Somehow he got poop on his feet, legs, and the rug, so I found myself on the ground with a tub of baby wipes trying to get rid of all remnants of poopiness. At this very moment, the 5 year old comes downstairs, weeds her way through our little audience of Dan and the rest of the kids, climbs over the baby gate in front of the bathroom, and crouches down and says, “So, what happened to you? I thought you were going to play Barbies with me, you promised! I have a new idea for what we can do, we can take out the Barbie pool and…” You have got to be kidding me.
Well, so what followed in the next few hours were two more poop incidents, during one of which he again did not make it to the toilet in time. I can’t believe I was naïve enough to think it was all over after the horrible first incident. I have to say though, by the end of the night his attitude, which had started as “pooping is bad, this is horrible, please don’t make me do it,” had evolved into, “Yeah! I pooped! I’m awesome! I can do this!” I felt so proud.
There was one moment where it felt like everything culminated into one big giant affirmation that we were not quite ready to have children. In this moment, I was in the upstairs bathroom with Poopy McPooperson, dealing with incident number three, when I heard the baby screaming at the bottom of the stairs. I yelled for Dan, who was supposedly “watching” her, and I heard the sound of my 6’3, 190 pound husband running through the house to her rescue. At the bottom of the stairs, he found the screaming baby laying flat on her back with our little sheltie pup standing right on top of her! I’m totally serious. I could not make this shit up.
I think for now, we’re perfectly happy with it being just the three of us (Dan, myself, and the pup) in our cozy little home, living our charmed newlywed life. I like my aerobics class on Tuesdays and my belly dancing class on Wednesdays. I like my Sunday nights of un-interrupted Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy viewing. And I really like having my cute husband all to myself.
Yup, for now, I think we’re doing just fine.
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