Showers and steamers

Warning: This has nothing to do with our quest to lose 200 pounds, but I’m compelled to share it anyway.

It’s the morning of Christmas Eve day, and both of my kids are a little sick. Ezra (who is 7 months old, for those who don’t know), has a terrible runny nose/cough and has a doc appointment this morning. So my wife is going to take him to the doctor, and then head over to Grandma & Grandpa’s to spend the day. Mia (my 2-year-old daughter) and I are going to skip the doc appointment, and just shower up/get ready on our own. So I hop in the shower while Mia frolics in the bathroom outside the shower door.

The shower door is obscured glass, so I can make out Mia’s shape and know whether she’s getting into trouble, but I can’t tell you *exactly* what she’s doing. Which is usually just fine for a five-minute shower. On this day, I see her running around, crawling on the ground, etc., and that’s good, because if she’s on the ground, she’s not crawling up anything that she can leap off of and break any bones. I also know that she’s naked, because she’s potty-training and just took her diaper to give it a trying peeing in the toilet (no luck).

So I’m halfway through my shower, and my wife bursts into the bathroom, coming back to pick up something she’s forgotten, apparently. “What the f**k?” she yells, louder and angrier than when she usually yells it. I open the door and find that my daughter has left a massive, steaming poop right on the center of bath towel on the bathroom floor. I am momentarily stunned, because a) she’s never pooped on the floor before, ever, and b) it’s perfectly centered on the towel. I don’t know whether that’s really lucky because it makes for easy cleanup, or just weird.

My wife really needs to get Ezra to the doctor because he’s sick and time is of the essence, and it’s the morning of Christmas Eve and it’ll be another two days, minimum, before he’ll have another chance to get in. So I say, “just put her in the shower with me, I’ll clean her up,” because, you know, when you crap on the floor, you leave some “shrapnel” behind that needs to be cleaned up. My daughter is ape-shit happy to get in the shower with me, because she nevers gets to, because I have a penis and all, and she’s my daughter, etc. But this is an extraordinary situation, so we waive the usual rule and she hops in.

I soon realize that this is going to be harder than I thought, because we just have a shower head in our shower — nothing detachable, no sprayer, nothing like that. And by the time the water from the shower head arrives all the way down at the level of a 2-year-old’s butt, it has very little pressure left. I’m trying to figure out a solution when Mia breaks my concentration by bellowing:

“DADDY’S PENIS! DADDY’S PENIS! DADDY’S PENIS! DADDY’S PENIS!”

Which, if nothing else, assures me that the rule of no-showering-with-Daddy is a good rule. Anyway, my daughter is very light, so I quickly figure out that holding her buttcrack up to the shower head is the way to go, despite her confusion about what the HELL I’m doing. I do my best to dodge the “shrapnel” as it is dislodged, but give my face a good rinse-off afterward just in case.

We’re all cleaned up, and just before we step out, I see through the obscured glass a black figure that trots in and stops in the vicinity of the steamer. It’s our black Lab, Holly, and se promptly starts lapping up my daughter’s shit. My wife sees this and literally throws Holly out of the room — impressive because Holly weighs 80 pounds and my wife weighs just over 90.

Mia and I finally exit the shower when I realize that, prior to the poop bomb, I was about three razor strokes into shaving off my 3-day growth. My face now looks like Steve Carell’s face in “The 40-Year-Old-Virgin” when he gives up the chest waxing halfway through it. Holly bounds in the door, and excited from her recent and unexpected meal, starts licking my face. Let’s put it this way — she hadn’t brushed her teeth or used mouthwash prior to doing so.

That’s the end of the story (what, that wasn’t enough?).

 

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24 December 2006 | Josh's Posts | Comments