Careful, don't sleep, you have a toddler...

I'll freely admit, I would openly laugh when I would hear stories of people's children decorating with their own feces and wonder privately, "How did they get THAT one past you?..." Oh, how karma is cruel...

Our daughter is quite fond of waking us up sometime roughly between 1am and 4am. She keeps us up just long enough that our sleep is disturbed, we have to fight to get her back to sleep, one of us is displaced from the bed either because we have to stay in hers or she climbs in, and all of us wake up cranky because we haven't had a solid five hours of sleep in almost 3 years (she's almost two and pregnancy enhanced my insomnia). She's normally fully dressed with 30 minutes of us acquiescing to her demands which means that the entire household is up by 5am.

We are not morning people. Having a child does not bestow upon you the superhuman zen-like patience of Dali Lama. We are still not morning people.

So after a heinous 5 day stretch of us not sleeping comfortably or for more than 4 hours at a time or  sharing a bed as a couple or making use of a bed... we were exhausted. Fighting over whose turn  it was to be tortured ensued and we ended up taking turns sleeping in her room or on the couch just so we could get some rest. It was early on a Sunday when I hit my breaking point. I grabbed a pillow, a blanket, and the couch in hopes of sleeping. Our lovely daughter was hemmed in by baby gates and doors so that she only had access to her room and the living room where I was sleeping. This assuaged my anxiety enough that I felt safe to sleep on the couch while she watched cartoons.
The first sign of something being dreadfully wrong was the smell that entered my nose upon waking only to be followed by the second sign, my daughter sitting next to my head on the couch - naked. The sight of her minus pj's and diaper put me in red alert. I sprang from the couch to see what was the matter. A smug of poo on the blanket?!....Oh no...A smug of poo on the brand new couch too?!...Oh fuck...The smell of poo from my HAND?! What the FUCK?!

I grabbed her up and made a mad dash to the bathroom to clean her up. On went the taps and in went the giggling kid into the bath. I was gambling that if she had the right combination of toys and bubbles I could hear her splashing and playing so that I knew she was safe. Anything to keep her contained and feces safely out of her grasp. She could shit-spa herself in the tub for all I cared just as long as our house was safe from her sticky toddler clutches.

First I checked my slippers - safe. Then I stripped, poop on my head and shirt, great. Easily cleaned and solved. On went the bathrobe as I armed myself with a bucket, rags, cleaner, and courage. The living room awaited me. The couch wasn't as bad as I imagined and was quickly clean. The blanket and pillow went straight into the wash but I could still smell poo...

Our new rug. The rug that I felt was the steal of the century. Silkily spun wool, low pile, beautiful pattern, found at a fraction of the price, difficult to replace on our budget...Oh god. The pattern and colors were the perfect camouflage for her butt soufflé. I spent the next hour on my hands and knees scrubbing out my daughter's shit from the rug. She made a figure eight on the rug to wipe the poo out of her crack and from her diaper that she had conveniently placed on her bed. A trail of poo lead me back to the source which was sitting next to her prized doll and bear. She was proud of her work.

All the while she had been happily, and loudly, playing in the bath reciting, "No-no, No-haaa - no!" Followed by laughter and an interjection of "mama, said" in her jabbering. The house now smelled of lavender, floor cleaner, wood polish, and baby wipes...it sill reeked when I went into the bathroom. I knelt down to check on Nora and asked her how she was doing. She looked up with bubbles on her face and smiled to show poop in her mouth.