Apology to the Parks and Rec Department of the City of Rock Island

I've had a rough week with the kiddos. The twins, Quinn and Heath, are working on the potty training issue, with our fall deadline approaching faster and faster (they have to be potty trained for preschool) Dax, who is 5 and generally potty trained was having some bowel issues for some reason.

So pretty much, I've been living in a house where three people poop anywhere except the toilet. If you come to my house and see a brown spot on the wall, and wonder to yourself, "Is that chocolate or poop?", just let me answer that right now for you. It's totally poop. (I try to keep on top of it, but it ends up in the weirdest places.)

Anyway, this week has been a particularly disgusting one on the poop front.

I spent a lot of this week at home with the kids because I didn't want to deal with accidents out in public. But it made me go insane to sit around the house and stare at poop smeared walls (like I said, I do try to clean it, but even once you wipe it up, you know it's there. Ugh)

So we ventured out.

I took the kids to the Y and I took a Zumba class. I haven't been to a Zumba class for a while. I used to really enjoy them, until I got burnt out on group exercise classes altogether. Zumba is supposedly a Latin inspired dance aerobics. (It's about as Latin as the Olive Garden is Italian) But it is pretty fun. I am a really, not good dancer, but I have a lot of fun with it. Whenever I'm in Zumba, I pretend I'm a drag queen. Seriously, I really do! There always seem to be a lot of self-conscious women in Zumba classes, barely moving themselves for fear of messing up. Whatever. I don't care if I look like an idiot. The more flamboyantly I "dance", the more calories I burn. And that's totally what I'm there for.

So after that successful outing, I decided to push our pooping luck and took the kids to Mojo's for lunch. They have delicious sandwiches that are huge enough for all of us to split one, and live music between 12-1 on weekdays. Dax absolutely loves the live music. He completely soaks up everything going on with the musicians. The twins kind of put up with it, but get a little restless so we couldn't stay long.

Still no pooping accidents! Yay! So because the sun was shining, and didn't look like it would be shining for long due to storms in the forecast, we went to the park. I like to take the kids out to a park pretty much every day. We have a nice backyard, but I like the variety of getting to explore different playground equipment, or seeing the boys interact with other kids. So I'm all over the QCs trying out the different parks.

So today, I got a coffee to go from Mojo's and we headed off to the park near the Hauberg Civic Center in Rock Island. I love, love, love the Hauberg Civic Center. It's a turn of the century mansion that is owned by the city.

Mario and I were married there. I was trying to explain that to the kids, but they couldn't understand what I was talking about. I kept saying "Daddy and I got married there." and they kept saying "You got Mary there?" (Mary is my aunt). This went on and on, them asking to go in to see Mary, and me trying to explain the concept of matrimony to them with no luck (maybe they're too young, or maybe they're too male to understand.) Finally, I tired of hearing them beg to see Mary and I totally lied and said "Sorry guys. Mary's taking a nap. We can't go in." And they were okay with that answer.

Okay, so now for the part of this story that the title refers to. We were doing so well, when Quinn came over to me with the "look". The look that says "I am currently squeezing a giant turd out of my butt."

Agh!

If he was wearing a diaper, it would have been pretty easy. Toss out the nasty diaper, wipe him up and head home for new undies or diaper (I had wipes in the car but no diapers for some reason.) I couldn't very well plop him down in his carseat with a butt full of crap, so I debated my limited options. The best option seemed to be to get rid of the turd, wipe him up and head home. But how do you dispose of a giant piece of crap?

There was no bathroom at the park to flush it. There were no stores around to go into to mooch their bathroom facilities. I couldn't dump it in the grass.

There was, however, a garbage can. But you can't just throw a turd into a garbage can unwrapped! Sick! Usually my car would have held any number of makeshift poop wrapping papers, but I actually cleaned it out yesterday. The only piece of garbage in the car at all was my Mojo's coffee cup.

I dumped out the leftover coffee, pulled down Quinn's pants, and like the worst vending machine in the history of vending machines, the big giant poop plopped into my coffee cup.

I put the lid back on, tossed it in the garbage can and drove away. Quickly.

So anyway, my apologies to the staff of the parks and recreation department of the city of Rock Island. I don't know why anyone would happen to open a coffee cup in the garbage can at the park, but if they do, they're in for a big surprise.