I thought with the addition of the third male in the house, and me being the only female, our second bathroom needed an overhaul to make it less feminine.   So, I wholeheartedly meant it when I asked the whole family to go with me to the store and help pick out colors and patterns.  But then, I saw it.  The shower curtain of my dreams.

I couldn't contain myself.  I had to make it mine.  My husband tried to steer me towards shower curtains that were striped and not too different in style from most of the shirts he wears.  I poo poo'd them all.  I just had to have that shower curtain; almost as if my self-identity was interwoven in its majestic silky threads and Bohemic style embroidery. 

My husband reminded me the reason we were redecorating in the first place was to find something less frilly, not more frilly, since the boys will be primarily using the bathroom.  "But our guests use that bathroom too!"  I cried out with my fingers crinkling the silk curtain in a panic.  "I don't want our guests to think my tastes are defined by anything other than this shower curtain." 

"What about the boys?"  He asked. 

"One is too young to care and the other one just picked out a plastic curtain with dancing monkeys on it!"  I replied.

"What about what I want?"  He asked.

And though I was desperately trying to not throw out the gender card, I did.  "Between all the burping and farting and wrestling and dirty clothes thrown all over the house, I feel so outnumbered!  Please let me have this." 

He finally succumbed.  Later, when I was putting up my shower curtain, my eldest was patiently watching me, cheering on my good tastes.  When I thanked him for his support, he simply responded, "Yeah, because I know I want dinner."

I was touched.  They get it when they're young and somehow...it just disappears.

We were out camping and something odd happened one night.  We were at the RV park's pool (I know...not camping) when two gentleman came into the pool area, smiled and said hello. 

I gave a half smirk back because I was too busy trying to figure out what their angle was in approaching me and being so pleasant.  Were they going to kill me, rape me, take my young?  They were just too friendly and it put me off because, quite frankly, not many people are these days.  Naturally, I figured they were up to something. 

However, a few minutes later their wives joined them and they also gave me a warm greeting.  When they actually spoke to me in a full sentence, I was finally able to pick up the foreign accent.  Coupled with the few words of German I picked up in their speech, I realized they were German tourists RVing through America. 

They played in the pool with my son and husband and were wholeheartedly kind and gracious.  Needless to say, I was quite ashamed that my first reaction to their kindness was to prepare myself for the commission of a crime.  But, it made me think what this poor country  has come to.  It isn't the state of our guardedness that bothers me, because we need to be guarded these days.  Thus, what bothers me is the necessity to be guarded.  How many of us would truly feel comfortable with two middle aged men in speedos playing with their four year old son in a pool if those were American men? 

Because as far as this mommy is concerned, if it wasn't for the European accent, the situation would have been completely anomalous to the American norm and I would have been right in assuming something could be afoot. 

Maybe I watch too many crime dramas on TV, maybe God has put me on high alert to prevent something horrible from happening in the future, and maybe it's a combination of the two. 

You know those big boxes of Pop-Tarts? Where you get a few of the frosted cinnamon and brown sugar, a few of the frosted cherry, and a few of the strawberry with no frosting whatsoever? Life can be like that. Some days, some moments, some memories, have the frosting. Others don’t. In my households, both the one I grew up in and the one I am building up now, no one ever wanted to touch those unfrosted Pop-Tarts. They would sit in the cupboard, alone in the box, right next to the regular flavored packets of oatmeal in their own variety box.

When I was a child, there was always a reckoning. Mom wouldn’t buy another box of Pop-Tarts (or oatmeal) until the undesirable ones were consumed. Sometimes, we had to take care of three boxes at a time. Triple the amount of unfrosted Pop-Tarts to choke down. Made me re-think procrastination

It was a tough day.  One calamity after another, begot one breakdown after another.  Near the end of the day,  I walked in the door to our house 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 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 it. That’s right, a spork. And it was when I was staring at that little poop smeared spork, I figured my day couldn’t get any worse. To know that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, have decided 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 I was engulfed in a world 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 handling 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.