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| as they say, “big jobs” |
Time was I was as prudish as the next man but that was before kids and with kids, everything changes. I’ve been wee’d on, poo’ed on, been sick on, been spat on, had to fish out half chewed food from mouths, apply cream to sore bottoms and it’s changed me. I am changed.
I now find myself telling gruesome stories in the office that are guaranteed to put people off their lunch. Like the time when Fifi, at a few months old let rips with an explosive poo on the change mat when I was in the middle of changing her nappy. The pre-explosion gurgle forwarned me so I lept out of the way but the stream of poo actually hit the wall opposite, and it wouldn’t come off. We had to repaint the wall. More than once. Or the time that one of our lovely darling children did a poo in their nappy at night. It was a hard solid one and it sort of got stuck half way out, so they reached down and pulled it out. We found them later and it was like something from the Exorcist- poo everywhere; under fingernails, in hair, on bed sheets, literally everywhere.
But there are so many tales, and in some way I get a perverse pleasure about telling them- passing on the feeling of revulsion it sets off in me I suppose. Did you know that the boy was so worried about not going to Butlins that when he was sick the morning we were due to head off, he bundled his duvet over it and left it the whole weekend to fester? He appeared in our room (a little too) bright-eyed and fully dressed. Neither of us spotted it until we got home 3 days later. I shampooed the carpet until I couldn’t smell sick any more but for the first ten times I got a nice lungful of the rancid aroma of it. And that was after I’d scraped it off the carpet and duvet so it wouldn’t clog the washing machine up.
I’ve stayed in Fifi’s bed with her until 4am to stop her being sick in her hair and then I’ve been sick so hard myself it’s all gone out of my nose.
I hate bodily functions. I’m none to keen on my own, they’re overly smelly and tend to make a mess. That was one of my big worries about having kids. How was I going to deal with the endless leakages from all ends? I’ve even had kids come up to me and wipe their freshly excavated boogies on my trousers for goodness sake. Well I’d be lying if I said he hasn’t tremendously traumatised me because it has but you know, as a parent you just have to get on with it. Kids are kids, they can’t sort it out for themselves so we have to. So I’ve rinsed, scrubbed, wiped, mopped,shampooed and scraped my way through pretty much every bodily excretion known to man and this includes that horrible green bile that you bring up when there’s nothing left to bring up by the way.
Still it’s what we do as parents isn’t it?