One Extreme to Another

Mondays are always hectic. I always seem to oversleep and scramble to assemble sippy cups still in the dishwasher, pull daycare sheets and blankets out of the dryer and get the kids up and out the door by 8am. So, any unforeseen obstacle on a Monday morning tends to really send me over the edge. This Monday morning [stop reading here if you are squeamish or in the middle of eating breakfast], I went to wake Emily and was immediately hit with that all too familiar stench: poop. Well, kids do sometimes poop in their diaper at night, which can be gross enough, but, you see, Emily decided to reach into her diaper and use her poop to finger paint all over her crib. With two kids in diapers, one kid who needs a lot of help on the potty and a dog, I am pretty much immune to poop, but this was a rather disgusting scene ... even for me.

And, so began my Monday morning. But, one thing I've noticed lately, is that if you spend your day with little kids, it can turn on a dime. One minute you are totally irked and annoyed and the next you are laughing out loud at something they do or say, almost forgetting the aforementioned irritation.

After giving Emily a bath, I did finally get all the kids out the door and in the car, heading to daycare. On the way there, I smelled a skunk and began talking to the kids about it. Up ahead, I saw a dead animal in the road, and said "Oh, look, that must be the skunk we smell." (Sure, I probably shouldn't be pointing out roadkill to my kids, but I was trying to keep them entertained.) As we passed the dead animal, Peter said: "Nope, that's not a skunk. That's a raccoon, or perhaps a badger." I swear, he said "or perhaps" and he's an American, not British, three-years-old boy. Also, it was a raccoon, after all. I laughed about that moment all morning, which made me forget about the poop ... well, almost.