But parents have to do it. This thought came to me yesterday as I was cleaning up Beth after lunch. It’s not just the diapers, those aren’t too bad. Especially before she started eating real food. After that it started to stink. She’s brought a tear to my eye a time or two. She usually poops twice a day, and if it’s just pee that’s even better.
No, it’s also the food, which got even more messy when she started feeding herself. Her latest thing is to take a handful of food and fling it to the floor when she’s getting full, or if she’s not too fond of the taste. Wouldn’t be a problem, but we feed her at the dining room table. And the dining room’s carpeted. We have a plastic sheet under her, with Pooh bear on it of course. But she gets it past the edge of that from time to time. Or she’ll drop it in her lap, or down the sides of her chair by her legs. So when you get her face and hands clean and pull her out of the high chair, you get to clean her bottom half. Then you clean the tray, and the seat, and the Pooh Bear mat, and the carpet. Then you look over everything one more time and find some food you missed. Then you may have to change her clothes because the meal was something messy and she got some past the bib. Then you can relax. Right.
Or it’s her toys. We have a big plastic bucket in the living room where we store a lot of her toys. And every day, when she gets done with breakfast, she begins pulling them out of the bucket and playing. She doesn’t have one toy she fixates on, she’s pretty democratic and plays with all of them. Which means she pulls them all out of the bucket and strews them across the floor. So when she goes down for a nap, or goes to bed for the night, you pick up all the toys and put them back in preparation for the next playtime.
But enough ranting. Since my last post she’s finally cutting in her sixth tooth, she’s expanding her vocabulary, and she still melts daddy’s heart with her smile.