Beans, Beans, The Wonderful Fruit

I love potty trained kids. Not only are potty trained kids usually old enough to reason with you also don't have to keep a daily accounting, even if forced, of what they ate for dinner every night this week. Potty trained kids are gems. They are self-sufficient little keepers that no daycare provider in their right mind would ever give up by choice. I love potty trained kids because I loathe poop.

There's just something nasty about poop. I don't care who you are or how much you might love your kids poop is just, well....it's poopy. It's smelly and gross and quite frankly makes you want to gag. In fact, poop is so vile to every person that even my three year olds in care have taken to using the phrase, "that's disgusting" when I change the poopy bottoms of their daytime friends. "Disgusting" is good word for it.

My personal favourite type of poop is the hard balls that just fall right into the diaper and take few wipes to clean the pink little bum that lies beneath. Hard poop is great (well, as "great" as any poop can be) and certainly takes favour over the other forms that poop can take on. Don't you just love it when you are sitting in the middle of the room and smell that familiar odor of dirty diaper? You stand up, step on the blocks you were building and curse Lego. Then you carefully pull out the diaper of each child just a tad to take a peek inside the dark cave of crap. There is always that one child that requires extra care when you pull back that diaper. This is the crack pooper. Yep, we all have a crack pooper. You know who he is. He is the child who, every single time he poops, manages to wedge the remnants of last nights dinner in a mud-like form up the crack of his butt until it eventually spills over the boundaries of his Huggies clad waist line. Yeah, the crack pooper is especially fun to change.

How many times have you changed the crack pooper and discover that despite your best attempt there is in fact, poop everywhere? It's on the changing pad and the back of his shirt. Half a pack of wipes later you have managed to clean the child up but are left with poop covered clothes to bag and hold onto for the remainder of the day. If you have a multiple time per day crack pooper you will find yourself silently cursing the poor child every time he poops.

Then of course there is the acid pooper. This is the child who always manages to smell like an open bottle of vinegar each and every time she poops. The smell of the acidic pooper makes you wish you had crack pooper on your change table instead. There have been occasions wherein I have thought of ordering masks just for acidic poop changes. I have both acid and crack pooper to thank for that wonderful waifing aroma that catches my nostrils every time I open my garage door. If you ever wanted to know why the sewage treatment plant smells the way it does then my garage would be a good first exercise in understanding just how easily a small amount of poop can make a large space smell like a latrine on a hot summer day.

They say that what goes in must come out. I guess 'they' have a point. It would be nice though if I didn't have such intimate knowledge of what exactly did go in to these little gaffers. I like beans as much as the next person but there is something not quite right about putting a fork full of chili beans in my mouth at dinner a mere two hours after having viewed them from the other end of some one's butt. That vision can put a damper on any prize winning chili dinner.

I doubt that I will be able to escape the bane of diapers any time soon. It goes with the territory. And as they say in the biz, "it's an occupational hazard". I just wish the territory smelled more like roses than a septic tank. And if the parents could just stop serving beans my days would be so much better.

For concerns, advice or suggestions I welcome your email at judytrickett@yahoo.ca