A Veritable Shitstorm

As you will recall from my recent post, my daughter is no longer napping. Last week when I posted about this development, the unfortunate consequences of this were three in number, namely that she

1. Goes on a ripping rampage of any stray papers left in her, or my adjoining, bedroom
2. Has robbed me of the two hours of relative peace and work time that my sanity depends on
3. Has been an absolute, unrivalled, misbehavin’ mess of a child after the hour of 3pm. It works like this: As soon as I give up on the day’s nap, after about two hours of listening to her yell and destroy things, I release her from her “quiet time.” She smiles broadly and is blissfully happy at her tremendous victory for about five minutes. Then she yawns. And she instantly turns into the spawn of – I won’t say the devil – but one of his close relations. She is totally, completely unmanageable. She stomps up to 10 year-old boys and smacks them in their bellies (that’s as far as she can reach) for no reason whatsoever. Babies literally skitter away from her in terror. She is the menace of Park Slope.

And for a while, I thought these three downsides were about all I was going to have to deal with, in terms of the no-napping fall-out. Naïve, naïve. There is of course, awful consequence number 4 to be grappled with and it is that during the time my daughter should be napping, she:

4. Paints her body with fecal matter.

Her own, I mean. I guess that makes it a little better. I don’t know – the gross factor is so obscenely high, it’s really hard to judge. What I am trying to say is my daughter likes to take a dump in her diaper and smear it everywhere.

This has happened twice. I think you will agree that that is two times too many.

Cleaning up after a newborn who’s had a major butt blowout is one thing. Cleaning up after your two year-old who is using her bowel movements as some kind of guerilla warfare tactic is another thing altogether.

And she’s cleverly quiet about it too so I don’t hear anything and don’t come around to inquire. I mean, I should be alarmed by the silence but we parents know full well that when 30 minutes of peace falls into your lap, you are not going to question it.

And that is why my house is in the midst of an actual shitstorm.