Poo on the lip

Before I get cracking with this blog, if you don’t have kids you might want to look away now.

So. This was a while back. We were living in Texas, over two years ago. I forget the details running up to the event but I found myself downstairs washing up. Both Flossy and Freya were upstairs, Kate wasn’t around so I’m guessing it was a school day. I probably took maybe ten minutes to wash up and having completed my domestic responsibilities I paused. Upstairs was silent. No shouting. No crying. No nothing. Peace and quiet. Ha ha thought I, a prime opportunity to take a break and catch up on the sports news. What a fool. As the Norwegian saying goes “never trust a silent child for it means big trouble for dad.” My peaceful bubble of tranquility was broken by Flossy calling out, surprisingly calmly,

“Daddy, I’ve got poo on my lip.”

Well, few phrases can eject you faster from you seat than those words. I bolted up those stairs in a flash whilst, very wisely I think in hindsight, advising Flossy not to move a muscle. Or lick her lips.

What greeted me upstairs in the bathroom was some sort of poo crime scene. The evidence of Flossy’s activity for the last ten minutes horribly laid out before my eyes.

What had happened?

Well, firstly, Flossy clearly had experienced some wiping issues. This was clearly not a ‘one wipe wonder’ situation. Flossy at the time was new to the toilet game and, partly due to inexperience coupled with a height disadvantage, she tended to dismount the toilet in a sort of tobogganing style, ‘push and slide’, rather than the more socially considerate ‘lift and stand’ method. As a result, well…things got messy.

Now a lot of kids would have moved on, perhaps not even noticing the compromised toilet seat. Not Flossy. Clearly troubled by the mess she decided to clean things up, at first with toilet paper and then wet wipes. And a fair amount. Some ended up in the toilet bowl, some in the bin, some scattered across the wet bathroom floor and a few in the sink! Yes, Flossy had decided to make her own wet wipes and ferry them back and forth across our beautiful white bathroom leaving a sort of brown papier-mâché creation along with little brown foot prints going this way and that. I looked at the scene agog. Only to reminded by a little voice beside me,

“Daddy, I’ve still got poo on my lip.”

How the poo got there til this day remains a mystery. Only Flossy knows and that is perhaps how it should be. But for any parents who fancy a quiet 10 minutes. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.