She's lucky she's cute....

So, it was a good morning. The weather was crappy, but I got up before the kids, which meant I didn't have to corral them, or beg for ten minutes to have a shower. I was able to start on my schedule, which is always nice, rather than having to hit the ground running all the time.

So after I got William to school, I was back in the bathroom, when Abby came in and wanted a bath. She has her bath at night, before bed, so I gently told her that it wasn't bathtime. Still, she decided that she was done with her shirt. I took her shirt off, then she decided pants weren't her thing this morning, either. Then she started tugging at her diaper, saying that she wanted IT off as well. Any parent will tell you, kids love to be naked for some reason. I got tired of saying no, and I thought those words that can only spell disaster for the parent of a small child: "What harm can it do?"

Parents have already guessed what harm can be done when you let your two-year-old run around for longer than fifteen seconds without a diaper on. My daughter took a dump in the middle of the living room floor.

I apologize if anyone is reading this while eating lunch at their desk. But when you have kids, all of your stories involve poop one way or another. My daughter had decided that it was perfectly acceptable to relieve herself where she happened to be when the urge struck her. So I came downstairs, and got a whiff of that all-too-familiar smell.

Now most people would be upset, at finding poop in their living room. I tried to get agitated about it, but you see, my daughter is just so damned CUTE. And it's the worst in the morning. I think there's something to this whole "beauty sleep" idea, because my daughter is at her maximum cuteness factor between nine and ten in the morning. She recharges her cute cells overnight somehow, like her dimples are lunar-powered, or something. This phenomenon has saved her life on more than one occasion. Since it took her almost ten months to learn to sleep for more than two hours at a time, there were several mornings that her disarming smile was the only thing that kept her from meeting a horrifically violent end, probably involving every drop of blood leaving her body and one if not more broken windows. That's one of the things they don't tell you when you have kids -- you have vivid, full-colour fantasies about visiting grievous harm on them when they mess up your sleep. That's WHY they're so cute. If they weren't, you'd kill them.

So I cleaned up the poop, and we lost one of her toys in the process, because it was not anywhere near popular enough with the kids to warrant any kind of salvage effort. My position is, if she wanted it, she shouldn't have pooped on it. That seems reasonable to me. And I went on about my day. There was probably a teaching moment in there somewhere, like when you rub a puppy's nose in their business so that they learn not to do it any more. And it crossed my mind to have a little heart-to-rectum with my daughter about the most appropriate time, or for that matter, at least a less INappropriate time to void her bowels, but she had already moved on, and was lounging on the couch, watching Thomas the Tank Engine. And she was so cute, and it's such a short time she'll be two, that I decided to let it go.

But if she's still pooping on things when she's fifteen, I'll DEFINITELY say something. Probably.

After lunch.


Thanks for reading!