How you know you've married well and you're in this together...
11:15pm, we finish playing a game because Tuesdays are self proclaimed "date night at home." Mike goes upstairs and gets ready for bed. I lay the baby down and then go up as he is coming down. I feel the assault to my entire face as I walk up the stairs into a stench worse than a skunk. I ask him if he checked kids up there, quiet whisper yelling down the stairs. He said he thought maybe it originated with the kid at the bottom. I change my clothes. I catch a cricket that made it to our bathroom. I come downstairs and look all over for him, then hear that the boys' bathroom is running water. I go back up. I open their bedroom door and all that is left of my sinuses shrivels and dies right there along with whatever week old roadkill is in that bedroom. I go to the bathroom by sheer will power and memory because I think my eyes were burning. It only gets worse.
There is Michael with a 12 yr old kid getting sprayed down in the shower. Oh my, the smell was awful. He asked for paper towels and water. I left the room very willingly and turned the fan on high in the bedroom. Two other boys were somehow sound asleep in there. I made a small sound to make sure they both wiggled a little and nobody had died from asphyxiation from the terrible fumes. They both alerted. I prayed they would sleep through this and tomorrow believe it was all just a bad dream.
I left the room and went down stairs, trying to clear my nostrils of the lingering odor. I grabbed a cup. Someone had done that cruel and terrible thing where they stack 2 smaller cups inside a bigger cup in the cupboard, so little cups fell from the cabinet and bounced onto the barstool sitting below, then one fell to the ground. Stealthy, Meredith, stealthy. Remember you just put the baby down? The one who sleeps only 20 minutes at a time right now without touching you? Oh, and I still had a cricket in my hand. I met him out the front door.
I grabbed paper towels and returned to the crime scene. I then heard a noise. I'm not sure now whether I actually heard it or whether it was some 6th sense thing because I'm pretty sure even my ears were occluded from the stench of a million dirty diapers. I walked to the girls room and stood in their doorway a moment. I heard it again. "Emma, stop it," I said, as I talked to the black privacy tent she occupies. She heard me and started babbling. "NO, stop. Go to sleep," I said. Then I took two steps into the bedroom. After I was in the center of the room I heard a gasp and startled shriek and a child emerged over the trail of a nearby top bunk, sitting straight up and looking like she had just seen a ghost, saying "YOU SCARED ME!!" in a whisper scream. I'm guessing she heard me but was unsure what she actually heard, but enough to open her eyes. Then it felt to her like I was suddenly a stranger in the room. I stayed with her a minute, calmed her and let her tell me about how Emma had opened her tent up a bit ago and had her head out looking around when this child went to the restroom. She asked how Emma can get out of her bed now. I explained that there are zippers in the inside, the same ones she uses to close it when she goes to bed, and she uses to open it in the mornings to leave. The same zippers work at night too. "Oh," and she laid back down.
I bravely walked down the hallway to the bedroom where IT happened and pulled pajamas from the cubbies of the child who shall not be named in the hallway as I passed by. I found Michael with his cell phone flashlight wiping the netting that surrounds the special needs bed. Then I watched as he climbed out and went to the side of the bed and started wiping down the plastic on the pillow that we keep against the side of the bed to keep him from banging on the wall. The amount of spray coverage that was achieved might hold a record. I turned back to the child and opened the shirt up since he was having great difficulty finding the leg holes with his toes in the SHIRT I had handed him.
He dressed with some efficiency as the 2 yr old began talking. That kid has words. 100,000 words a day he needs to spend. Not unlike his momma, who is writing this long post at 12:02am, I suppose. Wrapped up in a blanket, somehow he didn't mind the stench in the room, but I guess maybe that's all part of the y chromosome.
Bed wiped, child re-introduced to a clean space to sleep, and fan turned down to low, we exited the room of monstrous stenches from explosive diapers, me grabbing the bathroom trash as I went and Michael hitting go on the washing machine in the hallway. .
Tonight Mike didn't call me to wash the head to toe pooped kid, not ask me to climb in the tented bed and wash the mattress. He took it and did it and somehow soldiered through the aroma, asking only for the tools to clean with.
I dont need to dream up perfection somewhere. There's really nothing more perfect than one who (**LOVINGLY**) willingly takes on hazardous waste at 11:15pm.
And yes, the trash made it all the way outside. I'm sure somebody was wondering... ;)
*note: the child pictured did not cause the fallout of November 2020. It was his brother.
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