peanut butter al fresco

Once a week, I have a private French lesson with the most lovely Belgian woman. She's very calm, civilized and pleasant.

Last week when we had our lesson, Madame and I were chatting in the living room while my son Jack played on the back porch. I'd left the door open so he could wander in and out and tell us all about his various exploits out there. Jack is not quite two years old, so these little updates consisted mostly of him charging into the living room with something in his hand, gabbling loudly and happily about it and running back out with great pride. In the nude.


The boy's had nasty rash, and I'd set up a nice space on the back porch for him to play while his bottom gets some air and gets a chance to heal.

So, Madame and I were sitting in the living room discussing the horror that is modern healthcare while she fought nodding off and occasionally told me what an awesome parent she thought I was, when I noticed Jack had walked in with what must be peanut butter all over his fingers and some foreign matter held delicately by the very tips of his fingers. I gently directed him outside.

On the way out, I realized what was on his hands because I could see he was holding a chunk of an intact turd. I'd say a half-turd. A demi-turd, if you will.

I rushed to get a paper towel to clean his hands off. As I wiped and wiped at his chubby little hands, I noticed that there was toddler poop all mashed under his nails and into the wrinkles on his knuckles. He was beaming and politely jargoning at me with an air of polite concern.

Of course, where there is one demi-turd, another demi-turd cannot be far behind. Perhaps that's what he was trying to point out to me, for at that point I realized that there was another discrete chunk of turd on the carpet and that wipes would be required to address both the finger mess and the carpet mess. I should have realized this from the start since he'd need extensive disinfecting.

Cursing my lack of foresight, I locked the erstwhile explorer outside while he bangs his besmirched hands on the window and went to retrieve the wipes and the whole role of paper towels. On the way out, I realize that bleach might also be handy for the situation that was unfolding on the glass of my back door with every impatient swat of his cakey mitt. Congratulating myself for thinking one step ahead, I rejoined the little fellow and started cleaning off his hands.

As I wiped and rubbed, he began stamping his feet as he asked me one incomprehensible question after the next about what exactly I thought was going on here. And he stepped in the heretofore-undiscovered-by-me original landing zone.

As I began the next phase of triage, I thought upon what an excellent mother I was not to have screamed even once! I was still smiling and chatting nicely to the poopetrator while Madame the Patient sat waiting on just the other side of the door. I quickly and deftly picked up the implicated foot to limit the damage. Too quickly and deftly, for I upset his balance, making him stumble.

Proving himself to be just as quick on his feet literally as I believed myself to be metaphorically, he set out to right himself.

And grabbed my hair.

The fumes went in my mouth, their source into my hair. I reached to disentangle him from my hair, and he regained his balance by firmly placing the remaining clean foot into the smushy pile of gastronomic evidence. Reassessing the situation, I realized there was poop on the doorframe, the door and its windows as well as on every available surface of the child except, interestingly, the back of him. I lifted him from behind and held him at arm's length as though he were a cat about to be bathed an edged through the door with grim determination to get us both to the bathtub without coming into contact with anything else I'd end up having to scrub.

At this point, Madame could see the full extent of the damage. As I commenced the bath-shower-bath-shower process required by an OCD cleansing of feces, she kindly scheduled our next session through the door and silently and mercifully left us to our dirty work.

Later on, when I returned to bleach the back porch, I noticed a small pile of apple slices and smeared peanut butter next to the other organic materials smeared at the scene of the crime. For a brief second I considered whether or not to ask myself the questions raised by this new evidence. No, I decided, I’m better off not thinking too hard about that particular wrinkle.