She Sticks Her Hand Where?

Little kids are obsessed with touching stuff. All kinds of stuff. They touch it with their little fingers, palms, feet, and mouths, much to their parents' frequent chagrin. Our little Beans are no exception.



As I've said before, Pooki and Pipsi are very different from one another and as they've grown and their personalites are becoming even more clearly defined, I see little Pipsi sharing a lot of similarities with Biscuit's younger self. Like her big brother, Pipsi will pause at the word "no" and retract her hand from whatever she's touching even if the word isn't directed at her. She's a little more cautious about everything and definitely wary of strangers, just like litle Biscuit was. Parki is not.



To Parki, "no" means that whatever has her attention is even more interesting than she first thought and definitely needs her hands on it and she needs to take it away from everyone else and spend some good one-on-one time with it, examining it in fine detail, evaluating its every characteristic, slobbering on it. Recently, she discovered a fascinating North-South-running crack in her backside that lives under her diaper. And she can't get enough of it. The first time she found it I thought it made a cute picture.



"Parki, did you find your bum? That's where the poop lives, Bean. Let's keep hands out of there. That's yucky," I said, tossing toys into the corner of the Beans' room in a Ten-Second-Tidy that the Beans admirably destroyed with the Five-Second-Franticthrowitallaround. In my frazzled state I made the grossest possible error I could have made.



"No, no, Parki, don't put your hands in there." And that was it. I was doomed the second I said it. I looked over at Pipsi, reassuring her that the "no" wasn't meant for her and it was okay to point at the pictures of butterflies with her middle finger and scream, "Beeeeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzz!" and I pretended not to notice Parki, who was looking at me with the brightest, most shiny, gleefully mischievous smile you've ever seen as she shoved her hand down the back of her diaper as far as it would go and turned and ran out the door to the hall.



Sigh.



At that moment, I made a mental note to myself to dress Parki exclusively in snap-bottom tops to nip that fetish in the bud. Then my crazily-hormonal post-pregnancy sleep-deprived brain must have deleted it.



A couple of days later the three of us were again playing in the Beans' room when I thought I noticed a funny smell. I grabbed the nearest Bean (Pipsi) for a smell check (negative) and went out in the hall in search of the probable offender. I found her at the end of the hall in the corner against the closet door with her hand down the back of her pants and that winning smile pasted broadly across her bright, beautiful little face.



Parki had hit paydirt.



Oh, no. I stopped dead in my tracks and paused to make sure my neutral-smile-poker-face was firmly in place. Check. Proceed-- act natural. Don't spook her. Approach slowly. Try a distraction. I bet you wish you had that helpful little voice in your head telling you what to do sometimes!



"Hi Parki! Where's your Binkie?" I asked, looking around on the floor and advancing toward my stinky little Bean.



"Bah? Whassit?" Parki asked back, looking around and pulling her hand out of her pants to make the broad, open-handed gesture the Beans do when asking where something is.



"I don't know," I said and, reaching down, gently grasped a fetid, brown-fingered Beanpaw, squishing down the howling fantods welling up inside and going into crisis-suppression mode.



"Come on, Parki, let's go wash hands!"



"Yaaah!" Parki squealed in agreement.



The Beans LOVE washing hands. They love water in any form, to be truthful, but today's story isn't about that as you well know.



With the offending hand firmly under control we proceeded to the sink, washed off the foul matter, returned to change her diaper and resumed playtime. I didn't bother changing Parki into a onesie because after all, she'd already enjoyed a massive emptying of her bowels and why make more laundry and therefore more work for myself? Mission successful: crisis averted. Congratulations Secret Agent Mom.



I was quite please with myself. Not as pleased as Parki was with her discovery of PantsTreasure, but still pleased. A little too pleased. Pleased to the point of complacency. Pleased to the point of hubristic. And that was bad-- very, very bad.



I think anytime people live together and become accustomed to each others' habits, it's easy to assume that these people will always maintain the same habits and patterns. It's easy to forget how unpredictable people can be. Even little people and their little bowels, which can hold more than one might think.



That evening we were eating dinner. Hubby, Biscuit and I were on the family room sofa and the Beans were happily occupying themselves and each other in the Little PlayZone, occasionally grazing off our plates and returning to play. Suddenly the MomAlarm bells went off because Parki was standing over in the corner, her hand down the back of her pants. This in and of itself wouldn't have been a big deal, but she had that little devilish grin on her face again.



And she was staring right at me.



"Parki? Did you poop your pants?" I asked, quickly clattering my dinner plate on the coffee table.

Out popped her hand and, you guessed it-- it was covered in poop. Again.

"Yeeeee!" Parki squealed, looking over at Pipsi with a gleam in her eye. In the instant between that moment and my arrival at her corner to swoop her up and prevent the havoc she was undoubtedly ready to wreak on her sister, a scene of Parki grabbing a handful of Pipsi's hair in her little brown fist flashed before my eyes. I imagined the ensuing moments: Hubby and Biscuit, vomiting all over the sofa, table, and family-room carpet, splashing some onto the Beans' toys for good measure and me, standing in the midst of all that pooke (yes, it's a new kind of matter created by the fusion of poop and puke), my arms full of screaming, poop-coated Beans, not knowing where to begin the cleanup.

Again, we were lucky and escaped without much of an incident. We cleaned up in the kitchen and eventually returned to our previous pursuits, although my appetite was greatly diminished after exposure to the contents of Parki's diaper (where does it all come from???). For the past several days, Parki has worn either full body jumpers or bottom-snap shirts and I have to watch both Beans at all times.

But what this has got me thinking about is a diaperless life for the Beans. We're getting to that point already! If she knows there's something in there then that's a great indication that she's getting ready to, gulp, POTTY TRAIN!

My friends, I think the fun may have just begun. If you don't hear from me for a while please just assume that I'm suffocating under a pile of pooke somewhere.