Gag!

I can't get over how fast time flies now that we have kids! It seems like just yesterday I was bawling my eyes out over another failed IVF attempt and here we are with 14 month old twins who are using sign language, trying to talk and putting things that are not trash in the trash can.

Not only can they put things in that shouldn't be thrown away but they take things out that should.

The kitchen trashcan has a lock on it that, when we remember to use it, keeps them from opening it. The diaper pails do not and the cans in the bathrooms are just open ones.

There are telltale signs that the children have been in the bathrooms: the toilet lids are down, toilet paper is on the counter or window sill and the trash cans are on the counter. They love to pull things out of the trash cans and hand them to me like their presenting me with the Crown Jewels!

The looks on their faces say, "Look mommy! I got you a used snot rag. Isn't it great?!"

Until recently we didn't worry about them getting into the diaper pails. I mean really, who opens those things if they don't have to. I guess ones nose needs to be higher than the lid to get the full effect of the odor but still...Gag!

About a week ago I was headed downstairs when I noticed the Engineer on the floor next to the diaper pail with a dirty diaper in his lap...a poopie diaper to be exact! He had one hand on the diaper and one in the poop and was looking a little concerned about what he was going to do about it.

Even he knew that this was not something that should go in his mouth.

I came close to screaming but bit my tongue so I wouldn't scare him into crawling away leaving a trail of poopie handprints on the one area of the first floor that has carpeting.

I picked him up, deposited the diaper back in the trashcan and headed into the bathroom to try to wash the hand of a 14 month old while holding him at the same time. I did manage but neither of us was happy when we it was over.

The other night I did that oatmeal in the crockpot overnight recipe - it was delicious by the way. I peeled and sliced the apples, put the apple peels, seeds, cores, etc. in the trash, turned on the crockpot and went to bed. The following morning when we came downstairs the oatmeal smelled heavenly. I helped myself to two (yes two) large bowls which I shared with the boys while they also had their morning banana and clementines.

About 20 minutes after finishing breakfast and cleaning up I was exercising my OCD by separating the kids' blocks, chew toys and stuffies when the Engineer rounded the corner munching on something and waving what appeared to be a slice of bacon. Mmmmm BACON!

Wait...where did he get bacon?!

Upon further inspection I discovered that it was, in fact, not bacon but rather apple peels that he pulled out of the kitchen trashcan...that I had forgotten to lock...again.

I made two New Year's resolutions this year. 1. Clean the office AKA the Abyss (See Flat Surface Disease). 2. Keep said office clean.

In an effort to keep this year's resolutions I tied a rope around my waist the other day and ventured into the Abyss while the boys were napping. I actually made really good progress and had to empty the round-file twice.

The first time I dumped the office trash into the large can in the garage I heard, "Do you need a tow truck, call me, I'm on the way."

Huh?

"Beep, Beep!"

Wait, what?!

I pushed on the top of the trash, "My name's Tommy and this is my Tow Truck."

Crap! That's where that toy ended up!

I began removing the stuff I had just dumped in, and looked into the bottom of the can to see a light blinking behind the white plastic of the bag from the DIAPER PAIL!

Eeeeeeeew! No no no no nooooooo not that...Anything but that!!!

I began to bargain...

I considered putting the lid on and pretending that I heard and seen nothing. But my conscience just wouldn't let me do it so, I tore a hole in the end of the bag and removed Tommy and his Tow Truck. Evidently it had been in the very bottom corner of the bag and had not contacted any of the poopie-ness that potentially comes with being in the diaper pail bag.

I refilled the trashcan, carried the toy truck into the house, promptly hosed it down with antibacterial cleaner, scrubbed it off with paper towels and then scrubbed myself off.

Poop doesn't particularly scare me. I mean it's just poop and it stinks but it's not like it's going to leap up out of the diaper and smear itself on me. Trash picking the diaper pail bag skeeves me out more than a poopie diaper does.

This is not the case for the hubby. He tends to freak out a bit about poop and I think I've figured out why.

When I change a poopie diaper I don't inspect or analyze the contents. I open it, scrape the poop off their butt, clean with additional wipes, wrap them in the dirty diaper and put it in the pail.

Hubby analyzes.

No wonder he is prone to gagging!

I try to feed the kids balanced meals and most of the time, to my surprise, I actually achieve this goal.

The kids will eat just about anything but hubby won't eat broccoli. He does eat peas, green beans, spinach and Brussels sprouts. Nights we don't do green we do carrots or corn - I know more of a starch than a veggie but I'm trying.

Recently we had a couple of nights of baked chicken with sweet potato fries and green beans. Well rounded meals complete with cookies for dessert. Unless we have fresh pears then they want nothing to do with cookies. But I digress...

Sometime during that week hubby was changing the stuntman's diaper when I heard, "The green stuff is not processing."

"Hmmm," I thought to myself, "that's interesting."

No sooner did I finish this thought did I hear, "DID YOU HEAR ME??? THE GREEN STUFF IS NOT PROCESSING!"

I replied that I did indeed hear him but that there was nothing I could do about it. I did, however, thank him for his observation.

Once he had finished the diaper change and washed his hands he remarked that it was really disgusting. I pointed out that if he spent less time analyzing it, he might not gag.  "After all," I said, "you're just changing a diaper, not trying to recover a pair of ingested diamond earrings."

He gagged.

Skeeved Out

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The boys got us all colds for the holidays.

What began as a tingling in my nose quickly developed into a sore throat followed by a full blown head cold!

This is only the second cold the boys have ever had. But this one was a champion mucus producer!

I had no idea that this much snot could come out of someone so small!

One year olds don't know how to blow their noses.

They do it once in a while, usually without a tissue in front of them and produce phenomenal snot bubbles, but rarely can you get them to blow into the tissue. Typically they just want to rip it to shreds and/or chew on it.

Colds aside, Christmas was fantastic!

Christmas eve was wonderful. My sister and her family, plus a few friends, came for lunch. They got to spend time spoiling the boys and exchanging gifts. I love spending time with family and now that we have the boys, it's becoming more and more important to me. My niece and her friends even helped me decorate the sugar cookies that we would be bringing with us to the in-laws house on Christmas day.

For my entire life Christmas day has always been the same: Wake up, do stockings, eat breakfast and then open gifts. This Christmas was the first one I can remember not doing breakfast in between stockings and gifts. In order to keep the kids entertained we went right into gifts from stockings and then enjoyed a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon.

Mmmmmm bacon! Best. Food. Ever!

The rest of the morning was pretty laid back. My mom, who had spent the night, headed home to get ready for Christmas dinner - and catch a nap- can you say jealous?! We played with the kids' new toys, showered and headed to my in-laws house.

I love my in-laws. I know, I know, I'm supposed to have some level of dislike for the in-laws and call them out-laws or something but that's just not the case.

They are wonderful people who are fun to be with.

My mother-in-law is a great cook and meals are always delicious. Also, she never lets me help with anything aside from clearing the table so it's like a little vacation when we are there!

Even though their colds were full-blown the boys were good for the evening. Of course a little dimetapp to control the congestion and an additional dozen or so people to entertain them didn't hurt either!

The ride home was mostly uneventful except for this sudden, gag-inducing odor that emanated from the backseat!

Ugh! It was so disgusting!!!

We pulled into the first gas station we could find (which was closed because of the holiday) emptied out the back of the Explorer to make room to change a diaper and unloaded the engineer expecting a blow-out of epic proportions. We pulled him from the carseat, laid him on the deck, unzipped his pajamas only to discover that he was clean and mostly dry.

Hubby got busy unbuckling the stuntman as I reassembled the, now screaming and seriously pissed off engineer and got him buckled back in. I rushed back to the stuntman unzipped his pajamas and discovered the same thing. Clean and mostly dry.

O! M! G! Do you know what that means?!

That was one serious fart!

How something so small could produce and odor like that is beyond me. I need to figure out what I fed him that would cause that odor and never feed it to him again!

We reassembled baby number two, got him buckled in and the car repacked and continued down the road. It took about two miles before they both settled down, stopped screaming and passed out.

Hubby took the next couple of days off from work. It was great having him here...sort of.

I love spending time with him but sometimes - and this was one of them - his presence more of a burden than any sort of help at all.

Hubby is so overwhelmed by the amount of clutter - translation: toys - that he has decided that building the playroom in the basement can't wait. As a result, he spent the bulk of the weekend working on wiring and sub-flooring.

He keeps his tools in our garage. He tried to grab everything he needed so that he could just stay downstairs and work but there were times that he needed additional tools.

As long as daddy was out of sight, the kids were fine.

Every time he would emerge from the basement they would toddle over to him exclaiming, "Da da da da!" They were so excited that the 'fun guy" was home!

He'd play with them for a minute then head into the garage to find whatever tool brought him up from the basement in the first place and the kids would begin screaming because he had left them. Like puppies with no concept of time, they would get all excited when he came back in from the garage greeting him with another chorus of, "Da da da da!"

He'd play with them again - not like he had any choice, they were on his legs like velcro - and then head into the basement to get back to work leaving me with two screaming toddlers.

Each time he came up for air, I had to stop what I was doing and distract the kids long enough to forget that the "fun guy" was behind that door!

When not consoling distraught 13-month olds, I kept myself busy by making more cookies to take to a party and steam cleaning the kitchen floor.

I'm pretty far from being a neat-nick but I do try to keep things relatively clean especially since the kids like to eat things that they find on the floor. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that the stuntman throws his Cheerios on the floor just so he can eat them later.

After I was finished with the steam cleaner I emptied the fresh water tank and asked hubby to take it to the basement for me.

He carried it down the steps and put it on "my side" of the basement, (You know? The side with the washer and dryer :), came upstairs to get something and when he had returned discovered that the cleaner had begun to leak on the cement floor.

He completely freaked out.

Evidently I had not seated the tank properly and the cleaning solution was leaking out onto the CEMENT floor.

The most amazing part of this whole scenario is that he works with pools and high tech pool equipment for a living! You'd think, based on his reaction, that he'd never seen water before.

I grabbed a couple of dirty towels off the floor of "my side," dried up the mess and reseated the tank. Problem solved - I'm a hero! Ha.

I will never understand his instinct to panic. I guess each person is different that way.

I might panic over things like...oh a spider for instance, but have something catastrophic happen in front of me and I'm calm as a cucumber.

I hate spiders!

For Christmas the boys' cousins gave them two packs of these really cool small square foam pieces that have letters and numbers in the middle of them and dovetail sides so that they can be connected to make blocks or a mat for the floor.  Trying to contain the clutter, I grabbed an empty bin from the basement (that hubby couldn't seem to find) to put them in when the boys are not playing with them.

After bringing the bin upstairs and putting the foam pieces into it, I was sitting on the floor of the playroom with the boys when a huge spider ran across the rug in an attempt to escape. Evidently I had transported him upstairs with the bin.

Lovely!

I can't even begin to verbalize the noise that emanated from my throat but it brought both my mom and the hubby into the room. I managed to squish the spider but knocked the stuntman onto his butt in the process. He was nonplussed but I was completely skeeved out and had an overwhelming urge to change my clothes less any other arachnids had ventured onto my clothing.

I can deal with most bugs. I may not like them but they don't skeeve me out like spiders do. I've gotten better over the years and have even been known to kill a spider barehanded but the big ones just send me over the edge!

The playroom is coming along nicely! The wiring is completed, lights are installed and dividing wall between the playroom and man-cave are finished. There is now a huge stack of drywall on the floor and hubby is chomping at the bit to get back to it.

For now though, he is at work, the boys are napping and I have my peace and quiet back.

The Blow-Out System

The list of things that gross me out is getting pretty long. I didn't used to be the type of person that one would consider squeamish (well unless you consider my arachnophobia but that's a fear not a gross-out factor) that was before I stepped in cold baby puke on my way to bed. Hubby asked why I didn't step in it while it was warm? Funny guy.

When the boys are in their highchairs snacking on Cheerios they tend to drop a considerable amount of them into the chair alongside their thighs and near their adorable little behinds. We usually reach down, scoop them up and put them back on their trays. This is an every day, sometimes multiple times a day, occurrence. So much so in fact that I no longer do the full-body flinch when coming in contact with wet, mushy Cheerios. Its just part of the experience.

Imagine my surprise the other night when I reached into the highchair to do the usual Cheerio harvest and came up with a handful of poop! Yup, baby poop! Not the brownish-yellow poop that one usually envisions when the words baby and poop are uttered in the same sentence; this was spinach week. The poo was exceptionally dark and well, leafy.

I screamed.

Hubby ran in from the other room to see what was going on only to discover me standing in the middle of the kitchen with my left hand covered in poop (oh and I was overdue to cut my nails - I'll let you draw that picture) telling him to get the paper towels to put down on the changing table.

We have come up with a "system" for dealing with blowouts, which for one of my boys seems to be a way of life. One of us grabs the paper towels and lays them out on the changing table. The other, carrying the baby, as my grandmother would say, "Like they were carrying a dead cat," brings the child in and puts him down on the towels and commences to change the diaper and clothing. While that is being done the first parent - usually the hubby - returns to the scene of the crime to deal with the clean up.

Minor blowouts are dealt with Clorox Clean-Ups. Major blowouts require the use of the garden hose which, I believe, we have resorted to at least five times now. If the hose is necessary, once the chunks are removed the highchair cover - which by the way is made of the most incredible material known to man - is taken to the washing machine where it is then washed on the "sanitize" cycle.

Once the diaper has been removed and all traces of poop have been scraped off the tushy, the diaper, wipes and paper towels go directly into the trashcan. This keeps us - and when I say us I mean me see Wash, Dry, Fold, Repeat - from having to wash the changing pad cover every time there is a blow-out.

My hubby thinks I take pity on him when I choose to change the diapers but really I am taking pity on the babies. Hubby is wonderful and jumps in to help out on nearly everything but I am a better diaper changer in these scenarios so it is less stressful for the kids and, as much as I am humored by the sound, it keeps him from gagging!

He has come close the throwing up about three times, which in the span of nine months is not that much but I have never gagged. I guess that's because when I know there is a poopie diaper I expect it to be um...poopie.

There is nothing about poop that is attractive to look at.

I can't even begin to tell you the number of times that I have heard, "Oh! My! God!" when he is changing a diaper. Initially the OMG! was followed by the very distinct sound of gagging. He’s gotten better with the gagging but is still surprised on a regular basis.

I just can't fathom the shock.

Seriously...You couldn't smell that?