All you needs are logs; Logs are all you need

My husband and I aren't big on celebrating the Hallmark celebrations imposed on us. The worst one is Valentine's Day. I honestly think it's a Get Out Of Jail Free Card for men who behave badly.
Husbands, boyfriends and partners can act like schmucks 364 days of the year and then, on one dreary day in February, boom! All of a sudden, they're Enrique Iglesias: "I can be your hero baby. I can kiss away the pain. I will stand by you forever. You can take my breath away."
Oh barf.
You see, a real man is someone who deals with the real crap of life.
The shit.
The dirt.
The logs.

It's Friday night, the day before Valentine's Day, and my husband is tired from a long day at work. And I'm pooped from being laid off. (Being laid off is tiring, but that's another whole post.) My husband is downstairs on the couch snoozing and I'm upstairs in our bathroom giving our two-and-a-half year old son a bath.

We're playing with his fishies and fishing rod, his Little People boat and he's having a blast blowing bubbles in the water and splashing me. I'm wet so I turn to get a towel when I notice there's a magazine on top of our toilet tank. The magazine is promoting a contest to win a trip to Texas. This looks interesting ....

I swear I looked away for two seconds. Three seconds tops.

"Mommy!" my son yells.

"There's dog poo in the bath!"

I turn to look at my son and he is holding – I'm gagging just writing this – a log of poop in each hand.

"Look! Dog poo!" he squeals.

For a split second, I'm horrified. How did dog poo get in my ..... oh nooooooo.

For the first time in two and a half years - the first time in his life - my son has gone to the bathroom in the bath tub.

And now, he's holding it. Scrutinizing it. Studying it. Squishing it. (Insert more gagging here...)

"Oh my god!" I scream, which has its intended effect. My husband comes running up the stairs.

"Look, daddy! Dog poo!"

My husband shakes the logs out of my sons hands while I head out of the room. It's leave the room or throw up.

My son stands wrapped in a towel cutely trying to explain to both of us how the doggie doos came to be while my husband, god bless his soul and god help me I hope he really scrubbed his hands, picks up all the bits from the bathtub. He then scrubs the tub. Sanitizes it. Scrubs it again. Sanitizes it. And rinses it all away – while I stand with my son and run dirty towels and bathmats down to the washing machine.

Would I have done the cleaning if I had been home alone at the time? Absolutely. But, without complaining or asking for help, my husband took on the "jobs."

Now that's a gift.

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See the little turds all floating around Pt. 2 (aka, poo in the sink)

To understand this moment of sheer barfiness, one must first read 'See the little turds all floating around' below. Then you may read on to enjoy this moment of groddy-ness.

So, last night, The Husband is in our den, which is on the main floor of our house. I'm upstairs, cleaning up, when all of a sudden, I start to shriek: "Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!"

"What's wrong?" he screams up at me.

"There's poo in the bathroom sink!" I cry inbetween gags.

I can hear him bounding downstairs into the laundry room. He assumes that we've had another backup and the feces have backed up so far that now they're exploding up through our sinks.

But that's not actually what happened.

I had picked up a dirty diaper from my son's room.

When I tossed it (a little too hard, a little too fast) into the garbage can in the bathroom, a pancake-shaped doo-doo slipped out of the diaper and landed in the sink.

Bleh!

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'See the little turds all floating around'

Saturday morning of the long weekend, and I am standing in my laundry room with my new best friend Justin. Justin, you see, is the man who was supposed to make all my problems disappear.
What Justin has to say is serious business. I watch as my husband and Justin talk, each nodding their head knowingly about the situation at hand and what we have to do to fix it. I shake my head knowingly, too, pretending to be interested in the conversation. But truth be told, I’m daydreaming about a Girl Guide camp I went to when I was 12 years old. It was there, in our tent, late at night, that I learned something dirty, something so disgusting my mother banned me from repeating it in our house for many years. But here, in my own laundry room, the song danced around my head, like the doo doos that were bobbing up and down on my laundry room floor in a flood of black water.
“Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Chief inspector of the outhouse can. Toilet paper, toilet paper, paper towels, listen to the rumble of the human bowels.
“Deep down, under the ground, see the little turds all floating around. Sam. Sam. The laboratory man. Scooping up the poopies with his bare, bare hands. Yah!”
Our home, it seems, was experiencing a main line backup. When Justin The Plumber first got to our house that morning, he thought our problem was a minor blockage in the sewer pipe. An hour later, the situation has been upgraded to what my two-year-old son would call an “uh-oh.”
Justin feeds a black-and-white camera down our main line through our “cleanout,” which looks like a portal to another world (it’s really just a hole in our floor) to see what is causing the problem.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he says, as he stares at what looked like blobs to me.
(Apparently sometimes you can see rats crawling toward you, so I’m happy I see only blobs.)
As he feeds the camera through our line, he points out one, two, three, four massive tree roots that have grown into our line. The roots, he says, are acting as barriers, so things – food, toilet paper, other non-mentionables that go down the toilet – can’t pass.
“Man, really, I’ve never seen anything like this. Your line also looks deformed!”
Really, truly, I’m so glad my pipes are so screwed up we could be a training academy for apprenticing plumbers, but it has to be pointed out that the, ahem, Number 2s are still doing the backstroke around my laundry room floor.
Now, this is really awful, but I truly want to go up to Justin and gently explain that those little swimmers aren’t mine. I don’t know whose they are – maybe a neighbour’s? a sewer rat’s? – but they aren’t mine.
After much discussion about how we were going to solve this stinky situation, Justin The Plumber recommends he doesn’t clean our main line. He’d pushed through a blockage that was causing the problem but he says our pipe is too fragile and too deformed to be cleaned and the whole thing could crumble – which would cause more of a backup. His advice is to get the whole pipe, tree roots and all, dug out and replaced.
Then Justin The Plumber says something I’ll never forget: “I hate to give good people bad news, but these things can run as high as $8,000, $10,000.”
I think back to my laundry room floor.
Maybe I’ll take a gamble. I did, after all, get hitched in Vegas last year.
“How long will our pipe last if we don’t fix it?” I ask.
Justin The Plumber says our pipe may last a few months.
Or, our very next flush could be our last.
So, what he was saying is: It’s a crapshoot.

[This column appeared today in the Ticket, the magazine I edit that appears every Saturday inside the Kingston Whig-Standard, my day job. Starting this week, I'll post my Whig column here regularly.]

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Let them eat quiche!

My dad is really, really tired of hearing about poo and all things associated with poo. Baby poo. Baby farts. Baby diapers. Baby poo. Baby pee. Yellow poo. Brown poo. Yellow poo with green flecks. Poo that seems thicker after a couple of meals of formula instead of breast milk.

Poo, poo, poo.

Well, today, three of my peeps and I talked about baby poo, baby farts and baby diapers and there was no daddy-o there to say "enough already! Can't we talk about something other than bowel movements?"

We did talk about other things: Daycare, naps, strollers, exercise, jobs, university, first babies, second babies and breastfeeding but we were also free to talk about the p-word.

Every Wednesday morning, a group of us get together with trainer Tracie Smith-Beyak and exercise our buns off. I've talked about Tracie and her Kingston company, BodyNow4Mums, here before but I wanted to pay homage to her again - tis the season to be thankful.

Since I joined her power walking/conditioning group in October, I've felt and seen my body change. My baby tummy is flatter. My legs feel stronger and I can lunge with the best of 'em. Sure, I've also been exercising on my own but I always crap out when I'm going solo. I skip that last set of crunches or decide to cut my jog by 10 minutes but you can't pull a fast one when you've got Tracie watching over you.

This week, I went to the gym to go for a run. Usually, when I've been inactive for a few months - or, nine months when I was pregnant - I can only run a three-minute race. Seriously.

This week, I power-walked for five and then ran my heart out for another 15 minutes and then power walked for five more minutes. In total, I covered almost two kilometres and burned 200 calories. I chalk it up to my Wednesday power mornings.

But something else important is happening on Wednesday mornings: Us gals are bonding - not just over babies but feeling the burn. And this week, we gathered at one of the women's houses for quiche, muffins, French toast, and gab.

One of the women in the Wednesday morning class told us all a story about being out in Kingston and seeing a sad and exhausted-looking new mommy. She said the new mommy confessed she didn't have any friends with babies and felt very alone. The woman in my class gave the new mommy her phone number and said to call at any time.

I've been there. My two best girlfriends also don't have babies yet and so there have been times I wanted some company - just someone to say "Hey, do you share your bed with your baby?" or "How much did you spend on your baby jogging stroller?"

So, to all you new mommies (or soon to be mommies who'll be ready to work out in a couple of months) visit Tracie's site, e-mail her or give her a call and see if one of her classes work for you. (Christmas present, wink, wink.) And come hang out with us.

This is my way of reaching out to those of you who need someone to listen to you - and won't judge you if you do want to ask about poo.

Once the winter BodyNow4Mums term starts, we're going to hang out after some of our classes - a chance for mommies to talk, chill and eat quiche.

Plus, I make a mean cracker and cheese plate you really don't want to miss.

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