On Monday nights I come home from work a little early so Shawna can go to yoga. I wrote this entry after watching Wyatt for 2 hours last week and can only imagine that this is what it must be like most of the time for single parents.
I came home from work at 5:30 to see Shawna off and take charge of Wyatt. The evening started off on a good note. Wyatt
had been kind of fussy and had a few falls during the day, but he was
very happy for Daddy to be home. He gave me a big hug and patted my back before saying goodbye to Mama. Wyatt
had a late lunch that day, so I let him play for a while before fixing
dinner. We played ball, he had his soft soccer ball and I had the 42
inch beach ball. We took turns throwing them to each other and playing
chase. Then I let Wyatt play on his own for a
while as I watched from the couch. He kept on climbing in his big duplo
box to try and get up on the window sill.
By 6:15, he was hungry so I started prepping dinner while he waited
relatively patiently at the kitchen gate (by prepping dinner, I mean
heating up leftover pizza). Wyatt had pizza and
fruit, with some cake for dessert. Bozeman and Casy were both very
impatient about getting their meals, either by barking or biting my feet. Eventually everyone was fed and me and Wyatt
had time to sit down and enjoy dinner. By the end of the meal, he was
pretty messy with a combination of pizza, juice, and cake covering him,
so it was straight to the bath.
To change things up a bit, I played some music while Wyatt was in the bath. Wyatt
was into it and started grooving in the bath tub. I let him play for a
long time, evidently too long judging by what happened next. I was
checking the music on the laptop and looked back into the tub to see 2
turds floating in the water. I could hardly believe that those giant
turds came from a 15-month old baby butt. From here, the evening went
into disaster recovery mode. I fished out the turds with my
hands and toilet paper, flushed them, and started draining all the
scattered poop fragments. It was of course a difficult task to keep Wyatt from playing with them while they circled the drain.
At that point, I switched to shower mode and started hosing him and
the tub down. When he was thoroughly rinsed, I brought over the soap
and scrubbed any part of him that I thought would have had significant
fecal exposure. Moments later he was dry and deposited outside the
bathroom to play while I finished cleaning up. I had scarcely begun to
wash the bath toys when I realized it was a little too quiet out there.
I looked and saw that the kitchen gate was still open from dinner. I
ran to the kitchen to find Wyatt scavenging the pet food cabinet, trying to get into Bozeman's treats (I guess Wyatt
wanted to try one of Bozeman's cookies for himself). I removed him
from the kitchen and closed the gate, thinking he must now be barred
from all forbidden areas. As I returned to cleaning the bathtub, Wyatt
stumbled back into the bathroom carrying the dog food bowl. I took the
dog food bowl and freed up his hands to grab the hand soap and stick
the spigot in his mouth.
After finally finishing the bathroom cleaning and rinsing the soap out of Wyatt's mouth, I thought that nothing else could go wrong this evening, but I underestimated our son's penchant for mischief.
All this time he had still been running around naked since his bath,
and he managed to squeeze out a little pee on the laminate floor. I
narrowly avoided stepping in it, but it was clear that Wyatt's footprints had already been through it. After mopping up the pee and dressing Wyatt, I had just enough time left in the evening to ponder how much I should tell Shawna when she got home.
