Poop and Roses (Not for the easily squeemish!!)

* Disclaimer- this post contains content that to some may be disgusting, gross or some other form of those words*

*This post is also guaranteed to be hilarious! So enter at your own risk and weigh you humor vs grossness ratio to decided if this post is for you or not*

Have you made up your mind yet?

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Are you sure?  You are??

Okay, then here we go...

Poop...

Yeah that's right, this is a blog post about poop.

All kinds of poop!  baby poop, sick poop, dog poop, poop in diapers, poop in toilets, poop outside, poop on the carpet inside, and the worst of all...poop on me!

Since we are all adults, I am sure you guys can handle the word poop, but if not feel free to giggle every time you read it ...after all, it's not like we can see you right now and you can always pretend like you were a mature adult while reading this and we will never know any different!

BUT...for those of you that might be offended or grossed out by the word "Poop" we shall call it roses.

So let me start by saying, my husband has been deployed for roughly 4 months now, and I have had to deal with more roses in those 4 months than in the entire 5 years I have been a mother!!!! 

And like I said before, it is all different kinds of roses.  Baby roses, sick roses,  dog roses, roses in diapers, roses in toilets, roses outside, roses inside on the carpet and worst of all...roses on me.

Well, about a week after my husband deployed the roses started...My adorable 2 year old immediately started having lots of roses.  And not just normal roses. But roses of a strange color, texture, and smell.  So I took Konner to the Dr. and told him all about the horrible roses that he had been having for 3 weeks. The Dr. was a little concerned it had lasted so long so he wanted me to collect a sample for him.

YEP...that's right...HE WANTED A SAMPLE!!

So he sent me home with 3 little tubes full of some sort of mystery liquid and told me to "extract a sample from the diaper and put enough in the bottles to raise this mystery fluid up to the line."  Sounds easy...gross...but easy, RIGHT?!?!?  So we get home and Konner gives me his first roses (isn't he sweet! He gave his mommy roses...I wish they had been real ones!)

Here is where things start to get tricky (and sticky)...The roses that Konner were having at the time were practically liquid...and he was having said roses in a disposable diaper...which pretty much immediately absorbed all the liquid roses!  Also, the tubes were in a little complicated.

You know those little bottles of bubbles like for weddings that have the wand attached to the lid and you just pop it off??? Well that is what these little tubes were like, only instead of a bubble wand it had a spork like thing on the end. Yes, a SPORK like thing.  (which in my opinion just made things harder because the spork like prongs would get caught on the disposable diaper and tear it and I was given specific instructions to make sure that none of the diaper got into the sample...all those little wet bead like things that come out of disposable diapers couldn't get in there...yet the tool they gave me ripped open the diaper exposing thousands of them!) What was a mother to do???  I called the lab and explained the situation.  They said come in and we will give you something else to help with it.  So I drive the kids the 30 minutes to the base clinic where they give me this plastic bowl like contraption.  I am supposed to take it home, set it inside the toilet (it had a bowl in the middle and then plastic wing type things that rested on the edge of the toilet between the actual bowl and the seat). So I am supposed to set it in the toilet, then when Konner starts acting like he is going to give me some roses, hold him on the toilet over this bowl thing and then extract it from the bowl and put it in the tubes. It sounds like a great plan and it completely eliminated the whole disposable diaper/gel bead things issue.

Well, let me tell you. That was a lot easier said than done!

First off,  the roses that Konner was having were completely unpredictable.  It was as if someone had fed him some level 10 spicy curry...he literally had no control over when or where he gave me these roses.  So trying to figure out when he was going to go was hard enough but then I had to constantly be close enough to bathroom to be able to get him in the bathroom, get his pants and diaper off and get him on the toilet, HOPEFULLY without getting roses everywhere.

This is where things get gross and we get into the worst roses of all...roses on me.

So Ashlynn, Konner and I were playing in his bedroom (which is directly across the hall from the bathroom. We spent about 3 hours playing in his room waiting for him to give me some roses.  So, we are playing and I see Konner get this look on his face...it was a weird look but I knew what it meant...it was that look of when you are sick to your stomach and you don't think you make it to the bathroom or you are afraid to do it because you are afraid these roses have thorns and might hurt you...

So, I quickly grab him and turn towards the bathroom. While walking (well, running!) towards the bathroom I took his pants off.  We get into the bathroom and I turn him towards me to check the diaper. (I wanted to make sure there weren't already roses in it before I ripped it off and flung it everywhere) I looked and there weren't any roses. So I stand him up in front of me facing him towards the toilet and start to undo the diaper.  As soon I get the diaper off Konner starts giving me the roses...

I was completely unprepared for what happened next.

Imagine if you will, a bottle of ranch.  You know how when you get down to the very bottom of it, you turn it upside down and shake it to get the last bit out? Now picture how it comes out, There is a big blob that comes out of the middle straight down on the plate, then the rest kinda splatters all around it, and the bottle makes a sort of farting sound. (Which my daughter thinks is hilarious!)

Well, that is EXACTLY how Konner gave me the roses...right onto my lap...onto my legs because I had shorts on, on my shorts and the bottom of my shirt.  It also splattered around me onto the wall, cabinets, door, tub and floor.  I did manage to get some of it into the bowl for the samples but I am fairly confident that he got more OUT of the toilet than in the toilet!

I did manage to get the samples together and fill the containers up to the line and put some in an empty urine sample cup.  

I couldn't take the samples to the clinic until the following morning because by this time they were already closed.  So I go read the directions in the paperwork the lab guy gave me. And there it is, "What to do if you can not deliver specimen immediately"  and do you know what the answer was???

KEEP IN FREEZER UNTIL YOU CAN GET THE SPECIMEN BACK TO THE LAB!!!

So, they want me to take these rose samples, and put them in my freezer?  What, just set them on the shelf between the ice cream and frozen veggies???

It took me a good 10 minutes to get up the courage to actually place the tubes of roses in the freezer, where we store our food!  Then for the rest of the day, I would periodically open the freezer and see the roses sitting on the shelf in my freezer like some sort of rose Popsicles and think about how gross it was.  But, there was something wrong with my baby and this was the only way to find out what it is, so I suck it up, and deal with it.

Well, it turned out that Konner had an INTESTINAL PARASITE!! Most likely from something he ate.  Probably some sort of produce that wasn't cleaned well enough.  He needed antibiotics for 2 weeks and he was better. 

Well, I thought that all my rose troubles were over...but boy was I wrong!

We have a dog named Zoey.  Zoey is an 11 month old lab mix and she is a little ball of energy.  Since the hubby is deployed, I am on rose duty. Meaning I have to pick up all the roses from the backyard so that when the kiddo's go outside to play they don't get into the roses.

Now, most people would be worried that their kids would step in the roses because they didn't see it.  Yes, I would be worried about that too, but there is something far worse that I worry about.

 My kids seem to be attracted to the piles of roses outside!  It's like they are some sort of child magnet, or maybe some sort of children's crack that my kids are hooked on...I dunno what it is about the roses that my kids find so interesting but they sure do love it.  Maybe it's because I freak out when they get near it and they get a kick out of it. I dunno...

My son loves to walk up to them, call out to mama, and then squat down pointing at it...trying to touch it but not actually touching it...hovering his little fingers about a centimeter above the roses! 

Then Ashlynn will encourage him to come look at the roses.  One day they both were sitting on the ground facing each other holding their hands out.  When I asked what they were doing my daughter said "We are sitting at a camp fire, warming our hands".  I just thought they were pretending at first but after a minute I walked over to them to see what they were doing and boy was I surprised when their "campfire" was actually a pile of dog roses!!!

So, with the hubby gone I have to go outside every day or two with a walmart sack and a little shovel and collect all the roses. The winter has made it a little easier because the kids don't go outside as often so I don't have to do it as often. It is nice to not do it every day but it is worse because when I do do it there is a weeks worth of roses everywhere!  Plus, once again my kids fascination with the roses lures them to want to help me and inevitably one or both of them ends up some how touching the roses!!  Then it takes 20 minutes to get both kids in the house, into the bathroom and go through the hand washing process.  

  I would never have imagined that washing their hands would be such an ordeal.  While I'm washing Konner's hands, Ashlynn is splashing water everywhere, standing on the toilet pulling stuff out of the medicine cabinet that she isn't supposed to have or pumping the foaming hand soap all over everything BUT her hands!  Then when I am washing Ashlynn's hands Konner is doing the same things! He has also been known to grab stuff and try and stick it in the toilet! Then once his hand goes in the toilet I have to wash them again and we start all over... Oh well, this post isn't supposed to be about hand washing...it's about roses!

So, we are back to Zoey's roses now.  Zoey isn't exactly fully house trained yet.  She will whine to go out when we are home but if we are gone she will go in the house or while we are sleeping she will go in the house.  She has selected 2 favorite places to leave her roses.  Place #1- Ashlynn's closet...I am not sure why she has selected either place but this one is particularly odd because she has to go all the way downstairs and into her room and into her closet to get there!  Place #2- Konner room...but not just anywhere in his room...in one particular spot about a foot in front of his closet and always on the left side!  So of course when there are roses on the floor in his room Konner's fascination kicks in!!!  He runs over to it, squats down while calling my name and hovers his little fingers over it while yelling "Bad dog! Bad dog! Bad dog!"

Then I pick it up with toilet paper and try to flush it down the toilet! Most of the time it ends up being to big or too much and clogs up the toilet so I have to plunge it out!  VERY FRUSTRATING!!!

Okay, so to finish up, I would just like to say that I am so sick of roses!  These stories are the comical ones but we have had lots of other rose incidents too! Like when Konner had his parasite he would give me roses in the middle of the night, in his bed, and they would leak...even through two diapers, or one overnight diaper and a cloth diaper cover, and I would have to change his sheets at 3 a.m.  It would take just long enough for him to fully wake up so it would be a struggle to get him back down!!  Ashlynn had some sort of a stomach virus that led to accidents in her bed and pants as well and she spent 2 days in pull ups!  A few weeks ago we spent 3 days with all of us have very uncomfortable roses and throwing up!  It has been very interesting!

I love being a mother and it makes me sad when my kids are sick and we have to deal with roses but I would have to say if I never saw another rose again it wouldn't bother me at all!  I know that is an impossible hope but one can dream right?!?!?