Gumdrops & doo.

Put down your Reuben with extra Swiss.  We're about to talk about poo again.

(Thought it better to be blunt than to be stuck with your Brew Heaven tab because I ruined your scrumptious lunch.)

Learning the rhythm of a first child's excretory functions is a comedy of errors -- a comedy smeared and trickled up and down countless onesies, with the errors accomplished by the overwhelmed newbie parents for the sake of entertaining the public at large.

I know this because...I am that parent.  I've recently learned that there's nothing more useful than a Ziploc bag for containing the misjudgements of exactly how much doodle is in her newborn-size diaper.  By the dim beams of the Avenger's dome light, sometimes it's hard to tell.  And when the damage is done and the writing is on the wall ( and the backseat, and the seat belt, and her left sock), the best thing you can do is seal up the polluted garment, make a panicked attempt to mop up the mess with 1001 Wet Ones, and deploy the emergency onesie.

Sometimes unpleasant occasions like public full diaper blowouts can be reframed with humor -- moments to throw my head back and laugh at such jokes Mother Nature plays upon parents.  Just like my Grandma Bennett used to advise me when she'd offer to feed me something I didn't like: "Just close your eyes and pretend you're eating gumdrops."  Please don't misunderstand my metaphors; I'm not passing off poo as candy. In clearer terms: pretend that the hand you're dealt is the hand you anticipated anyway.  Crap happens.  I expect it to.  Sometimes, when I'm lucky, it doesn't affect anything in a long-term way, and if I'm mature enough to see that, sometimes the hand of crap I'm dealt is downright hilarious.

Grandma's trick has seen me through some difficult times.  

Ramen noodles can be a great dinner if you serve them in a fancy bowl from an estate sale.

Shopping for clothes at a thrift shop can be so much more interesting than dropping a wad of bills at the mall.  What I'm making up for with resourcefulness and creativity, I'm saving as peace of mind during the lean months.

When I wake up in the morning and the sky is sunless for the third day in a row, I slip into my riding boots and pretend I live in the James Bond's Scottish moor house from Skyfall.  (I have seriously considered tracking down some stag statuary to mount on stone pillars in the driveway since I've seen that movie.  That image was so imposing, it gave me chills!)

And when I'm carrying Ava to the cash register to pay the bill for my lunch and my remarkably observant five-year-old niece draws every eye in the joint by exclaiming, "SHE'S PEEING!!!", I'll take that moment to capture a mental snapshot of my horrified face as I realize that the contents of my daughter's saturated diaper are running down her pants as well as mine.  Because it's going to make a darn hilarious story to tell the kids in ten years when we're all huddled in the storm cellar awaiting a tornado to blow us to kingdom come and have nothing better to do than laugh at ourselves.

Squish.  Yay!!!