“Daddy? Can I tell you something?”
“Sure Hun.”
“Your Dad Joke, where you call Shampoo, poo is actually kinda funny.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah! ShamPOO. Get it?”
“Yeah. I’m glad you get it. That is pretty funny. Isn’t it? Perhaps we really should call it poo for short?”
“No! I still don’t want people to think I rub poop in my hair!”
I smiled and topped off my coffee
(Oh my sweet little daughter. Truth is, you have had poop in your hair at some point in your life.)

Truth is, parenting is pretty scatological and if I don’t make these jokes, I’ll probably have an emotional breakdown.
The months leading up to becoming a parent, you remind yourself of all the diapers you’ll be changing. You do your best to mentally be ready for a lot of poop. You won’t quite be prepared. It’s easier with the second, but even then, by the time our second one was born I had forgotten just what incredible quantities can come out of a body so tiny. And forget the quantity, there’s also the travel ability. It can literally end up everywhere.
Another thing I was not prepared for is the lack of modesty. How readily and easily they just bend over to assume the wiping position. There’s Reggie, “I have poop in my diaper.” If you don’t respond to her proclamation immediately, she’ll turn around, stick her butt out at you, and start pointing to where the poop is. “Poop is right hee-uh!” Meanwhile I have Lyd graphically describing the shape and consistency of whatever she might have done that day.
Around 6:30 on any given night, you are guaranteed to see at least one, sometimes both girls scampering around the house without any clothing, shaking their booties at us. Sometimes they are trying to get us to “smell their stinky butts”.
(sigh)
Some days I swear, their digestive systems are synched. I’ll change Reggie’s diaper, pick her up and start carrying her downstairs. I’ll round a corner and there’s Lyd, bathroom door open, her little feet dangling, “I pooped too Daddy! We’re poop sisters!”
Wow…two buttholes in as many minutes. This might be a record for me.
It’s not just my kids! Thank God. I recently chaperoned a field trip, and I overheard a conversation about poop–how often, issues (before and after), the qualities of what they dropped.
As my wife so eloquently put it, “I was ready for diapers. But…I was not ready for so much…butt.” Seriously, parenting is really just a series of underestimations.
Truth is, after a few months into this parenting gig, scatological thoughts are likely one of your top ten most consistent thoughts. You see it everywhere, you hear about it everywhere. Some days you swear you can smell it everywhere. Your sense of humor digresses to that of a twelve year old boy.
Realizations begin hitting you, you might have the kid potty-trained, but you still have two or three years of helping them wipe. Reg is just starting to potty-train…I’ll be doing this sort of thing, for…years!
It becomes such a thing in your life that honestly, I’m not sure what I’m going to do with myself once the girls become big enough where they will not need help anymore.
In the face of that sort of a situation, you start developing a sort of gallows humor concerning poop. If you don’t laugh you will hysterically cry. Parents in the end, have to accept facts, most of them involve accepting how cool you once were and those days are officially behind you.
Wiping butts is every parent’s doody.
Get it? Doody?