Loving, Laughing, and Trying to Leave a Legacy
Real Name: Heather Ijames Member Since: May 29, 2007 Last Signed In: July 22, 2008 Profile Views: 262 Blog Views: 642 Call Yourself a Parent Utterly Unspeakable Nostalgia Thank You Northwest Voice IF I Ever Have Children To My Youngest Child Beautiful Things The Gender Card American Miss-Manners Life Can be a Variety Box of Pop-Tarts May 07 June 07 July 07 August 07 September 07 October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 . 
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Yesterday was a tough day. It started with me losing my patience with our pool contractor. A pipe had broken, the pool was losing its recently filled water, he let us know that completion was going take two extra weeks on top of the eight we had contracted for, and I was just plum tired of being nice about it all. I told my husband that he needed to deal with them, while I retreated to my computer to respond to some e-mails.
That’s when I noticed that the computer wouldn’t even turn on. After attempting to fix it myself, I reluctantly found myself standing in the repair line at Best Buy for thirty-five minutes with my toddler, Ethan, and my oversized computer tower. When I finally found myself talking to a member of the Geek Squad, (their term, not mine, and he definitely looked the part with his pasty white skin, half-inch thick round-rimmed glasses, his 110 lb., 6’4” tall frame, and a perfectly but unfortunately placed white-head smack in between his eyebrows), I started to cheer up because he was definitely excited about providing me with excellent customer service and I do like people who are actually happy to do a job they get paid for. However, my happiness was short lived as he started to tell me the plethora of problems that probably would need to be fixed with my computer, based on its age alone, and how my bill was quickly adding up to be about five hundred dollars. He opened up the side of the tower as Ethan quickly added, “The fan doesn’t work, the fan doesn’t work, the fan doesn’t work.” He was right, the fan didn’t work. He repeated his observation a few more times until I told the technician the reason Ethan kept repeating this was because he had overheard me say it earlier when I was trying to diagnose the problem myself. And as I finished my explanation, Ethan put up his little right index finger in the manner of a thought occurring to him and said, “Oh, but really, mommy said ‘you fricking computer’ and started to punch it a lot. And then she said the fan doesn’t work when I asked her why she was punching the computer.” I raised my eyes to the ceiling as I could hear the technician and other strangers around me chuckle at my son’s candidness and offered myself a mental note: even at three, he hears, sees and understands ALL! Unwilling to spend the five hundred dollars on a five year old computer, I took my broken computer tower back home. I walked in the door and saw a note left by my husband: I haven’t collected the sample yet. You’ll have to do it. What sample you ask? A stool sample from Ethan. He had been having stomach problems over the last week and the doctor ordered a stool sample. I had picked up the kit from the lab the previous day and was praying that Ethan’s crowning moment of the day (no pun intended) would occur on Daddy’s watch, not mine. But alas, today was my tough day. In anticipation of this eventual moment, I tried to pontificate, how does one collect a stool sample? I mean, there have been times in my past where my own doctors have requested a stool sample from me; specifically, the time I came back from Mexico still feeling ill after I ate an uncharacteristically warm mango on a stick from a beach vendor when I was in my early twenties. What can I say? When you’re young and your metabolism is still fast enough to wear an itsy bitsy bikini, you don’t worry about much, least alone what you put in your body. At any rate, my doctor asked for a stool sample but the sheer thought of fishing in the toilet for my own poopy made me want to take my chances of getting better without knowing exactly why I was sick to begin with. But, as all parents already know, what we won’t do for ourselves, we will do for our children if the need arises. So, back to the sample. It was nearing two o’clock and I had finally come up with my best idea on how to receive Ethan’s not so tiny turds. A paper plate held in the bowl by yours truly while Ethan did his business. At exactly 4:07 p.m., Ethan ran up to me and said he had to go poop. As I positioned the plate in the toilet and told Ethan to sit on the seat and go, he said, “I don’t want to poop on a plate! We eat on plates! I’m not hungry!” “Do it!” I commanded. “This is not for food, it’s for the doctor.” He was a trooper and laid what he called “a snake” on the plate and I quickly ushered him out of the bathroom and locked the door behind him. I didn’t want him to witness mommy playing with a plate of poop and giving him a whole new set of ideas of what can be done with his feces. I put on an industrially thick face mask to block the smell and started to open the containers the lab gave me to store the samples in. Thinking that the mask would protect me from the smell, I accidentally got too close to the plate o’ poopy during collection and got a good whiff of Ethan’s “snake”. I quickly stood up straight and saw my eyes starting to water in my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Yup, crap still manages to smell like crap, even with a mask on. Now, with my face a good distance away from the plate, I began to divide the sample between three different containers. Each container was sealed with a lid that had a miniature spork attached to the bottom of the lid. That’s right, a spork. And it was when I was staring at that little poop smeared spork, that I figured my day couldn’t get any worse. To know that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that a spork was the perfect instrument for school lunches and stool samples alike, and that I, myself, was seeing the rational behind providing sporks for this very purpose, I realized that I was engulfed in a world that I didn’t want to know anything about and had finally given up on my day getting any better. But, God’s grace can sometimes be found in His humor. As I was driving down to the lab to drop off the sample, I miraculously began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, my day had gotten the best of me but the thought of the lab staff that had to handle the sample after I dropped it off made me smile. As an attorney by trade I definitely have to peddle a lot of crap during the day but, at least, I don’t actually have to sift through it for a living. And with that realization, I could end my day on a higher note. I had passed the poop forward. |