I Heart My Little A-Holes Read online

  From the moment they’re born to the moment they finally drop their first log in the potty (Mommmmm, wiiiiipe meeeee!), you’ll change over 3,000 poopie diapers. No, I didn’t say diapers. I said POOPIE diapers. And yes, I did the math. Unless you have one of those weird kids who only poops like once every four days, in which case I hate you and please stop reading this now because I refuse to entertain people like you.

  So here goes. Ten poopie diaper scenarios that make me wish my kids were born without tushes. Awww shit, you know some jackass reading this is all pissed off now because some kids are born without tushes, and I’m an a-hole for making fun of them. Well, I apologize in advance to anyone whose kid doesn’t have a tush. Wait, no I don’t. I’ll trade ya.

  1. Remember when your kid was a newborn and they pooped like a million times a day and you thought it was disgusting only it wasn’t really because they weren’t even eating solids yet and you had no idea what was coming in a few months? But then once in a while something truly disgusting would happen. You’d have them on the changing table and you’d undo their diaper and suddenly they’d start pooping right then and there. And:

  A. Either it’s projectile poop and travels whatever the distance is to the nearest wall. Yes, even if you’re outside and the nearest wall is 200 feet away.

  Or B. It’s regular poop and you have to stand there watching it ooze out of them like one of those frigging Play-Doh machines that you push down the lever and make the Play-Doh come out of a hole (a hole not a-hole). And you kind of have to keep watching because you need to know when he’s finished only it feels really wrong to watch poop come out of your kid’s tush. Like really really wrong.

  2. Ho-hummm, I wonder what I can do to make my mommy’s job harder. Oh, I know! I’m gonna dip my feet into the pupu platter and watch her freak out and say, “Nooooo,” and then wipe them down with a wipe like a thousand times. And then just as soon as she’s done I’m gonna stick my feet in my mouth and really freak her out.

  3. Okay, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from Grey’s Anatomy it’s that all doctors are hot and like to have sex in the on-call room. And if there are two things I’ve learned it’s how to scrub each finger individually with lots of soap. So why the hell when I change a poopie diaper and I scrub like that do my fingers still smell like poop for the rest of the day? Because if they still smell, I have to assume it’s because they have poo particles on them, which is just awesome when you’re eating French fries later and your friends are like, “That’s weird, why do you eat fries with a fork?” “Umm, because my fingers are speckled with poo particles.”

  4. Okay, where is the cameraman? Surely someone is going to pop out at any moment and shout, “You’ve been punk’d” or, “You’re on Candid Camera” or some shit like that because there is no way this ginormous crap the size of Rhode Island came out of this tiny little baby. Surely they did a Folgers coffee switch and had a man poop in a diaper and put it on my little one when I wasn’t looking.

  5. What smells? Well, I know it’s not my kid because I just changed his diaper like three minutes ago. And so begins the poop-smelling domino effect around Gymboree. One mom after another yanks her kid towards her by the waistband and fearlessly buries her nose in his tush. After a few minutes, I finally do the same. Whew-eeee! Did you seriously do that again?! Only when I take a peek inside there’s nothing. Ahhhh, the residual poop smell on the pants. Rogue poop particles again. Is it wrong to spray your kid’s butt with Febreze?

  6. Whatta you mean they don’t make size ten diapers? Yeah, his tush fits in a four, but his poop doesn’t. Hence the giant brown amoeba moving up his back. So basically I have two choices. Either he gets a shampoop when I take his onesie off over his head, or I’m breaking out the scissors and cutting off his onesie which is now more of a number twosie. When is someone going to invent a diaper turtleneck that’ll protect the entire back? Or a full diaper scuba outfit? Million. Dollar. Idea.

  7. Have you ever wrestled a greased pig? No, me neither. But I could. I could seriously win like the redneck Olympics of greased pig wrestling because that’s what I do every damn day. At some age babies start to HATE being on the changing table, and the second you get the diaper off they’re basically a rolling pin on a pile of poop. Yo Darwin, I used to believe your theories but now I’m starting to think you’re wrong. ’Cause if evolution were really happening, moms would have eight arms. At least. And noses that couldn’t smell. And larger vajayjays. Not that that has anything to do with changing poopie diapers. Just sayin’.

  8. Oh hello blueberries and black beans and corn. Fancy meeting you here. Not. So basically what you’re telling me is that the twenty minutes I spent making my kid’s food dance and sing and vroom vroom like an F’ing truck was a total waste of time and that my kid’s getting zero nutrition. Awesome.

  9. So I’m about to change a poopie diaper and I think I have it all under control when I reach into the wipes and oh shit. There’s only one wipe left. Agggh, I’m gonna kill my husband (even though I have no idea if he was the last one to use the wipes, but I can’t help from being mad at him still). Anyways, I have to somehow manage to clean alllll of this poo with one measly little wipe. So I wind up folding it like 96 times, and by the end I’m basically wiping the poo with my fingertips. Hellllo, poo particle French fries.

  10. (Please sing the following to the tune of “Smelly Cat” from Friends)

  Sticky poo, sticky poo,

  Did my kid eat Elmer’s glue?

  Sticky poo, sticky poo,

  Go the F away.

  I’ve already used 9,000 wipes,

  It shouldn’t take this long to change a dipe,

  I feel like Lady MacBeth here,

  When I’m done I’ll surely need a beer.

  Sticky Poo, sticky poo,

  I need a Brillo pad,

  Sticky poo, sticky poo,

  You suck my assssss.

  Alrighty then, ass seems like the perfect word to end this on.

  Tents are F’ing AWESOME! Until one kid poops and it’s like a Dutch oven that singes all of your nose hairs.

  Poop mobile

  You know when Dateline goes into a hotel room and shines that black light thingie all over everything to show where all the fecal matter is and the remote control is like an F’ing hot zone? I mean it looks like someone needed to go to the bathroom but the housekeeper was cleaning it or something so they just crouched down and laid a log right on the remote control. Someone once told me to bring a Ziploc bag on vacation because you can still work the remote through the bag. Well, lemme ask you this. Would you hold someone else’s poop log in a plastic bag? Hells no. I’ll just walk up to the TV from now on if I need to change the channel. In my Hazmat suit.

  Anyways, would you believe that this post is actually about the library? I shit you not. Pun totally intended.

  The way I feel when I enter a library is pretty much the way I feel when I hear from Dateline that the remote is covered in fecal matter. Because A. You can’t clean paper, so books like NEVER get cleaned. B. There’s always that weird, unsettling smell when you open a library book. And C. What do people do when they’re taking a shit? They read. Library books. While they’re pooping. Before they wash their hands. If I were younger I would put an emoticon here with someone throwing up, but alas the only emoticons forty-year-olds know are smiley face and frowny face. So L.

  Anyways, I kind of think my toddler likes to feed my fear because guess what that little a-hole (and I’m speaking literally) does every time we’re there. He takes a great big, giant poop. And to make things worse, guess what I do every time. I forget the diaper bag in the car. Every F’ing time.

  Like today. There we are in the library reading Winnie the Pooh (not really, but it makes this story better and I can’t remember what the F we were reading anyway because really I just read the words while I think about something else like chocolate or wine), when he sneaks behind the couch so he can be all stealthy and shit. Yeahhh, r
eal F’ing stealthy kiddo. A. I see your forehead with that massive purple vein all bulging out which only happens when you’re pushing out a poop or when you’re having an aneurism (hells yeah, I spelled it right on the first try!). And B. The whole library can hear you grunting.

  Of course it’s at this moment that I realize I left the diaper bag in the car. Are you kidding me? The way I see it I have two options:

  Option 1: I can look around for some non-pedophiley person in the library to watch him while I dash to the car as fast as humanly possible to grab the diaper bag. So I look around the library. Pedophile, porn surfer, pedophile, homeless person, nanny who’s paying more attention to her phone than the kid she’s supposedly watching, guy with a monocle in the reference section, porn surfer, pedophile. Shit, does nobody normal go to the library?

  Option 2: I can make him leave early and do the dreaded diaper change on the floor of the car. Little did I know leaving him with Mr. Peanut in the reference section would have been less frightening.

  Moms, you know that one poop a month that makes you wish you were born with three arms? This was one of those. Out the sides, up the back, coming out of places I didn’t even know existed. Does my son have some kind of second tush somewhere I don’t know about? Surely the doctor would have noticed when he was born, but I have to wonder. Seriously, how can so much poop come from this tiny little being? It takes every bit of skill I have to keep poop from getting on the car carpet.

  Well, fifteen minutes later, I manage to survive and so does the car. Barely. And the air is like seriously contaminated. I drive home in thirty-degree weather with all four windows rolled down and my head sticking out the window like a dog so I can breathe, my jowls flapping in the wind. And I swear to God the next time we go to the library I won’t forget the diaper bag. Of course, that’s what I said the last time.

  ZOEY: Somebody has to come and wipe me because I pooped a BIG one.

  This sentence basically sums up my job description. I think I’m going to add it to my Linked In profile.

  Just a random poop story that has nothing to do with my rug rats

  Once I worked at Express in the 90’s (what’s even more cliché is that I rollerbladed there), and every day around lunchtime someone would go into the Gap next door and take a dump in their dressing room. WTF, right? I’d love to know what was going through this guy’s mind when he did it the first time. Was he like, “I’m crazy and I think it’d be fun to take a crap in here?” Or was he like, “Shit, I have six more outfits to try on but I really have to go to the bathroom?” Probably a bit of both.

  Anyways, the first time it happened the employees were all like, “Ewww gross.” The second time they were like, “WTF?” And the third time they were like, “Oh no you di’n’t.”

  So one day there was a big stakeout to figure out who was the shitter. I wasn’t there to see it since I worked next door (thank F’ing God) but I can just picture all of the employees leaning over in the dressing room to see under the doors. Feet, feet, feet, feet, feet with a bare ass. Annnd, mystery solved. Although I always wonder whether they stopped him before he pooped that day or whether they needed to catch him in the act. And then did they let him finish or did they make him pinch the loaf mid poop? Yes, I’m a little F’ed in the head, but thanks to this experience, I know there’s at least one person who’s more F’ed up than I am.

  Hells yeah I’m putting on my oxygen mask before my kid’s

  Awww shit, my nose is broken. Nahh, not like some douchebag kicked it in and broke it. Like the smell function has gone kaput. Yup, I found this out on the way to Florida. Hells yeah, Florida, where the sun always shines and people eat in restaurants as early as we do.

  Anyways, we get through TSA, which I’m convinced stands for Totally Sucks Ass, and now we’re sitting on the airplane flying at 30,000 feet. My younger son, Holden, has apparently taken some NoDoz when I wasn’t looking because he’s bouncing off the plastic walls, and Zoey is comatose in front of the iPad watching Caillou, which amazingly still annoys me even though she’s wearing earphones and I can’t hear his whiny ass voice.

  I hear the people behind us talking about something that smells bad and I realize that Holden has just pooped his brains out, which wouldn’t be a big deal except the seatbelt sign is illuminated so we have no choice but to change him on the tray table. Awesome. Don’t worry, we scrubbed it down with hand sanitizer afterwards. Not really, but let’s just pretend we did. Besides, I’m sure the airlines clean them really well between flights. Bwahahahaha!

  Anyways, towards the middle of the flight I get a whiff of the poopie smell again. Are you F’ing kidding me? Again?! I swear kids save their shit up for days so they can do it like a thousand times while you’re traveling. Luckily this time we can use the lavatory so Greg offers to change him, which sounds like he’s trying to be nice but really he just can’t take Caillou anymore.

  While they’re gone I can hear the people talking behind me again. Apparently one of them is actually getting sick over the smell. Hmm, I don’t really smell anything, but when Greg gets back I’ll ask him to take Zoey next just in case.

  “No poop!” Greg reports back to me as he hands me Holden and picks up Zoey to take her.

  Ohhh shit. As soon as he picks her up, I see it and get a giant whiff. There it is, straight out of a Stephen King movie, a giant brown amoeba oozing up the back of her pants. And the smell is atrocious. Why the hell didn’t those oxygen masks drop from the ceiling?

  So here’s the bad part. Can you F’ing believe it? I haven’t even gotten to the bad part yet. The seat she’s been sitting in is made out a dark pattern to disguise stains, but I lean over to smell and examine it more closely and there it is. A giant diarrhea spot on more than half of the seat cushion. Who the hell knew your seat cushion can be used as a floater device too?

  OMG, what the hell do I do? Should I ring the call button? I can’t decide so I casually cover the wet spot with a burp cloth and wait for Greg to get back with our daughter, the Grand Poobah. When he does I tell him what’s going on, and he says, “Go figure,” and kindly hands me a baggie with her spontaneously-combustible pants inside. “We have to tell the flight attendant,” I say, thinking about the person who has to sit in this seat on the next flight. “What if they charge us for the cleaning?” he worries. Can you imagine? $35 for extra leg room. $100 for a poopie seat. Man, these airlines will milk you for anything.

  Still, I’m not a total a-hole so I can’t not say something (if my high school English teacher is reading this, she’s totally cringing at that double negative. Take that, Mrs. Meany Pants). So on the way out I whisper to the flight attendant, “You might want to check seat 27F. I think my daughter’s diaper leaked a little.” So the flight attendant is like, “Sure, buh-bye,” and clearly ignoring me. “No, I’m fucking serious,” I say. Well, I didn’t actually say the word fucking with my mouth, but I said it with my eyes and now she can tell I mean business. “Oh, okay, we definitely will.”

  But I gotta wonder. Why didn’t I smell the poop for so long? I mean the guy behind me was literally getting sick over it. Is it possible I’ve officially changed too many diapers and my nose is broken? Or is it like a Brita pitcher and I need to change the filter or something? I’ll have to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond to see if they carry nose filters. What section would they be in? Definitely not Bed. Bath or Beyond? Woo-hooo, I just remembered I have a 20% off coupon!

  Yeah, I fully expect to be senile and smearing poop all over the walls one day. I just hope I’m living with one of my kids when it happens. Payback’s a bitch.

  Itty-bitty potty party

  Once when Zoey was little I took her to the bathroom at the zoo, and when we were next in line one of the stalls opened up to reveal an itty-bitty potty just for little girls like her. I swear the angels sang in the heavens when she saw it. She had the most wonderful potty experience ever. Then it was my turn.

  ME: Okay, let’s go find Mommy a potty.


  ZOEY: No Mommy, use this one.

  While I really wanted to find a normal potty for myself, two things went through my head:

  1. You know how that first person in line right now is all filled with anticipation because she’s next? I’d have to go out there and burst her bubble and tell her why I’m allowed to cut in front of her because I already waited in line and now I need a different stall with a normal-sized potty.

  2. Zoey’s always using my big potties. It can’t hurt to use her little one just this once.

  What the hell, why not? So I dropped my pants and crouched down to go. Way down. Wayyyy down. I’m not exaggerating. This is how low this potty was. You know how you can see people’s feet beneath the stalls? Nikes, Pumas, Crocs, someone’s big ass, Adidas, Keds. I wish I were kidding.

  Dear anyone who saw my ass that day,

  I’m sorry you saw what you saw.

  I’m sorry if I caused you to go blind.

  I’m sorry if I scarred you for life.

  Sincerely,

  Baby Sideburns’ got a big ole butt,

  oh yeah

  Five brown shit dots

  Okay, the other night I’m out for drinks with a friend when she tells me something that’s been going on in her house and I’m like, “Nooo,” and she’s like, “Yes,” and I’m like, “Noooooo,” and she’s like, “Yessssss, I couldn’t make this up if I tried.” This is her story (retold by me because she didn’t make it funny enough and didn’t use enough curse words):

  So last week she was going to the bathroom and enjoying her People magazine, la la la la laaaa. She had two pages left to read in an article and unless it sounded like her kids were playing with guns or building WMDs outside the bathroom door, she wasn’t getting up for anything.