If It Looks Like Feces and Smells Like Feces... It's Feces!

I've been taking down the wallpaper in our bathroom for the past two weeks. Today I got to the area near the commode when I noticed a brown smudge. My gut said it was definitely feces. I got a little closer before coming to the same conclusion... yes it was feces. Brown in color and looked to be smeared by someone under the age of ten!
I told my husband but that dude wanted to draw other conclusions. In denial, he went on explaining why it was not feces. I pretended to listen but by the fourth sentence, he sounded like Charlie Brown's mother off the page.
"Why would you think it was doo-doo?" he so eloquently put it. "And who would do that?" he quickly added.
"WHAT? Are you serious?" I scoffed. "Unfortunately I've seen it before and one of your two off-springs did it," I confidently answered.
The sight of it took me back to when our seven-year-old was about eighteen months. I was pregnant with our youngest.
One day after I spanked her, I smelled something foul. I waddled around trying to find the smell. It was doo-doo! Smeared on the wall in her room! I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what to do. The smell was so foul that her brother, growing in my womb, was reacting to it. I had to rub my belly to get him calmed down.
Now I am weak when it comes to nasty stuff like that. Really weak. When they were smaller and would throw up, I would just throw a towel over it and wait for Dude to get home to clean it up. I felt bad when they would get stomach viruses and would want to be up under mommy. I would run away from them.
"Be a soldier! They are your babies!" Dude would scream.
Well I didn't have any experience with this one. Why would she play in her pamper?
She did this a few times for the next few months before I spoke to her pediatrician about it at one of her check-ups.
"Yes. It's a little normal for infants to do this- to play in their pampers out of curiosity, but at her age to be doing it means she is very angry about something," he explained.
My arms folded, I told him, "Uh, yes and I am angry too!"
He wanted to get to the bottom of what was making her so angry. I wanted to whip her lil nasty butt right there in that office. Or give her some extra vaccinations. ; )
Things had changed for her a little. We'd moved and I was pregnant with her brother so the doctor suggested that the changes were what was causing her to do this hideous thing.
All I knew was I was tired of our place smelling like a petting zoo!
I noticed she did it a few more times before I finally figured out something that deterred her from doing it again. I made her clean it up! Spanking her wasn't working. She wasn't yet two so I didn't want to spank her too much and when she was spanked, I found more of it smeared. I will bring this up when she is 30 and going on her first date.

Yippee That!

We (kids and I) are riding back from running errands, and they are just playing entirely too much. "STOP!!" I raise my voice. "Y'all are acting like you don't know any better. You aren't outside!"
I hear them snickering in the back seat.
Five minutes later they are back at it. It's as if they don't get spankings sometimes. I guess I don't give 'em good enough. Or they know when I am driving I can't do much.
"Okay. I was stopping at McDonald's but you can hang it up now. We are eating at home!"
"Yippee!" my seven-year-old yells.
I looked up in the mirror- shocked. No she didn't.
"And you aren't watching any TV when we get back- you're gonna get busy doing some work!" (right back at her with her little smart self)
"Yippee!" she cheered again.
I pressed my foot on that gas- couldn't wait to get home.
"And I am gonna whip your little butt- now yippee that!"
Didn't hear a sound the rest of the way home.

Those Were The Days

White boots with the orange wheels and a little pom-pom in front of the stopper! I had to have 'em. I jumped out my van.
"How much for the skates, sir?" I asked.
"Well, I think she just wants $2 for them," he replied.
It didn't dawn on me until I was pulling up in my driveway, that I hadn't checked the size. But it didn't matter- if they were too small I would just let my daughter grow into them.
Seeing those skates at that yard sale just took me back.
Back to the days when we played outside all day, until the street lights came on. A group of about 10 of us from the neighborhood would posse up and make dangerous ramps to skate off of. We'd fall, look at the scrape and get up and try it again- only higher. There was a church across the street from our apartments, just in eyesight of the older ladies who were always sitting out on the porch, watching after us (we really did have a village back then). There was a long hill behind the church. We would line up, grab each other by the sides, crouch down and skate down the hill together screaming.
When we got older, seventh or eighth grade, we were allowed to start going to the skating rink. Our moms would take turns dropping us off on Saturday nights and Wednesday nights in the summer time. It was always packed in the parking lot and inside. Don't know why we spent time grooming- as soon as we opened the door to go in every curl we had fell. I can still smell it- the smell of myriad funky socks, cheap cologne and musty armpits filling the air. It didn't matter though, it was so much fun!
We had to make sure we were outside to be picked up when our moms said to be or we got embarrassed. Once or twice we were late getting out and my mom came in to get us.
"Ah, your mom looking for yall!" someone would inform us.
By the time we pushed through to the door, there she was with her pink, dingy sponge rollers and a too small scarf. I don't know why but my mom's scarf always smelled like that popular children's medicine, Creomotion for Children.
Those were the days.