Today had such potential to be a good day. The sun is shining, it is above 50 degrees out there and I was ready to make a good day of it.

Gabe, however, had other plans…

It started out brilliantly. I woke up, had coffee and Gabe was being a real doll–not fussing, playing happily and just, in general, being a good baby. It felt like the perfect opportunity to go run some errands, and by running errands, I mean “go to Walmart,” as usual. Now, I’m not a ‘Mart fanatic. I’m a mother. I have limited time and resources. If I can make one trip, I better make it count. So, out of sanity-saving necessity, I go to the Mart. I hate the Mart, I do. But, shit, girllll, they got e’rthang!

I went to the Mart with the intention of getting Easter items for the kids along with various grocery items. Not that you care, but I was equipped with my coupons, money saving apps, huge diaper bag, baby carrier AND the baby. I was ready for the mission ahead of me. Once baby was dressed, fed and I had taken a pee, it was go time.

I figured I had 2 hours to get everything done before baby needed to nurse. I could do this! I was going to have fun while doing this! This was SPARTA! Yeah… not sure that reference works but you will take it and you will like it!!

So picture this– mother is shopping with darling baby strapped to her chest. She gazes down at him fondly. He looks up at her loving face, smiles, and rips a long, wet shit-fart that lasts a solid ten seconds. I laugh, nervously. I say to him, “Ooh! Boy, Gabe! That was a big stinker!” in a sing-song-y voice to try to mask my growing fear.

That was the warning blast. The following fart-trumpet is longer and wetter than the last.

And then I smell it.

Let me just tell you that this kid isn’t a pooper. He is exclusively breast fed with only an occasional formula bottle. He only poops once a week–maybe– and even then they weren’t nightmare poops. They were sometimes large but nothing that I’d need to warn the president about. So even though the smell was concerning and the sound of bowel movement confirmed, I still wasn’t worried. I was only half way done with my shopping though. It took me longer to decide to change him than I like to admit. I knew that he had pooped. I knew he would soon become uncomfortable. The variables were how big the poop was, how long he had to sit in it, and what was the intersecting point where diaper rash would develop. I tried to reason that we could possibly make it home if I started running and just throwing shit into my cart. If i said fuck it to coupons and price comparison we might be able to make it out of the store without having to do a diaper change. Then I could say fuck it to traffic lights and speed limits as well and just floor it all the way home.

I didn’t reach the end of the aisle before he started to fuss which, of course, meant defeat. I dragged the half full cart behind me, like a petulant child, sulking. I’d have to change the damn baby. Humph!

The small consolation was that I had my enormo diaper bag which is so big it certainly contained every thing a mother of an infant could conceivably need. That’s where, my friend, we both are wrong. This shitting bag had NOTHING. It contained two diapers (one was a newborn size so it wouldn’t even fit him), two small wipes samples I received in the mail but one only had two remaining wipes in it, my wallet and fifty fucking tubes of Chapstick.

No biggie. Like I said, the baby’s not a pooper. He has never shit his way out of an outfit before, he probably wasn’t going to start today!

He started today.

When we get to the bathrooms, I find the baby changing table in the family bathroom is broken. I am unaware of the magnitude of the situation so I simply shrug and go to the Ladies Room. Once on the table and the diaper is opened, I still am not concerned. Until I begin wiping that is. I’m happily talking with baby, saying “Oh my goodness, baby! You make a messy mess!” and I continue wiping. Then I realize that the poo is pretty far back in the diaper. I mean, REALLY far back. And I take a peek and realize I’d been trying to soak up the ocean with a roll of Bounty paper towels. #metaphor.

While I’m not enjoying myself, I still am trying to remain optimistic. I’m still chatting with baby, smiling good-naturedly at other women using the facilities. I say, “Oh boy, baby! This is a big poo!” and I share a look with other passing women that says, “Motherhood, amIright?”

While I’m keeping up my brave face and pretending to not notice I have poop on my forearm, I am plotting my next step. The onesie is dead in the water. The poo goes from ass to armpits, if not higher. I reason that baby could still wear his pants (clean) and his little jacket (clean) but the onesie is a lost cause. As I try to remove the jacket, the bottom of it gets dipped into the shit. It, too, is un-wearable. At least he still has pants, I think, my smile starting to ache and twitch at the corners. As I drag the shit soaked clothes off of my baby, and try to give him a wet-nap bath with the one remaining baby wipe I have, I realize that even if the pants remain unsoiled, what am I going to do? Drag him around the store with no shirt on like some tiny, hot-blooded redneck that is too good for shirts in 50 degree weather? I need to somehow get the shit off my arms (I’m pretty much baby-shit-orange from fingertip to elbow now) and figure out what to do with these poo covered clothes.

With the baby as clean as he’s going to get and a new, clean cleaner diaper on him (nothing was clean at this point) I tried to think like Magyver… I was Momgyver. What would Momgyver do? Well, smart mom would have somehow gotten her hands on a stupid Walmart sack (you know, the ones I was bitching about a few posts ago?) and stuck the filthy clothes in there until she got home. Wacked out of her mind Momgyver decided to scavenge for empty tampon bags in the bathroom stalls. Wouldn’t you know it, every single one had some bitch’s dirty rag in there… except one. The handicapped stall was the only one with an empty “feminine napkin bag.” I snatched that shit up and stuffed my kid’s shitty clothes inside. And then I put that in my purse.

Now I need to burn my purse…

Notice how I stopped calling it a diaper bag? Yeah. It’s an insult to diaper bags to call that thing anything other than a mother fucking purse. Chapstick and lip gloss… come ON!

Anyway, keep in mind here, my kid is now screaming bloody fucking murder and has been for a good, solid five minutes now. I figure, hell, he’s already flipping the fuck out, why not document? So, there’s pictures…

This is the aftermath. If you look carefully, you should be able to notice that there is an orange sheen on the entire grey changing station. This is the soft core version of the event that happened. I had stuff all over the place in an attempt to clean up my baby. I had crap strewn around like I owned the place. It also looked like someone had just shot a scat porno in the Walmart bathroom. Not sure what that says about me. Actually, I know exactly what that says about me. I’m just hoping you aren’t sure what that says about me.

Clearly, he is the only man alive that can pull off being nude with white socks. And, hey, do you see the giant brown bag hanging behind us? Not a single spare outfit in the whole giant thing. I could have made him an outfit out of paper because I have two notebooks in there. Or out of receipt paper and lip gloss. But not out of anything actually baby related. I guess now the diaper bag can be called a diaper bag because it smells like shit. I used up all the baby related essentials in ONE FELL SWOOP. It was easy since everything I had on me consisted of two diapers and maybe six baby wipes. You’d think the first two kids would have taught me something but, as they say, every baby is different and I am still the same, shitty mom I was the first time around.

So, there we were in the Walmart bathroom. Baby was still screaming his damn fool head off, I (obviously) had lost my damn fool mind and was trying to document the occasion with a smile. I was determined the day would NOT be a loss. I was still in a good mood, dammit. I was going to enjoy my fucking shopping trip. This was not going to defeat me! So I cleaned up the mess as best I could and attempted to wash my hands. I soaped up and scrubbed like I had just completed a lengthy surgery… actually they scrub up before surgery… well, no one operates on turds but me so I do things how I want in my story. Of course, Walmart being the billion dollar industry that it is, none of the automatic faucets work except the one intended for children and little people which is a convenient 12 inches from the floor. So I break my back trying to wash my hands in the mini-sink while my screaming baby dangles from my chest in his Baby Bjorn.

I’m pretty sure my smile just looks straight up crazy by this point.

When I finally exit the bathroom after what seems like an eternity, I’m not going to lie and say no one looked concerned. After hearing my baby scream in there for probably 10 full minutes and then seeing me emerge with him naked with the exception of an oddly orange diaper and two (miraculously) white socks.

I’m practically running to the baby section to buy this little turd a new outfit. And, yes, I’m a little ashamed to admit that I browsed. I didn’t just grab the first outfit I saw. I looked around a bit. I slowed down and shopped like a crazy broad with a police siren strapped to the front of her. I mean, he was already freaking out, pissed and close to crying himself into a coma. What was an extra 30 seconds? If I have to buy his little ass a new outfit for a damn trip to the Mart, I might as well get him something he will wear again, no?

For some reason there’s this odd Walmart worker sitting in the middle of the aisle on a stool right in front of where the bathrooms are, back by electronics. (Are all Walmarts built this way? I assume they are, with the bathrooms in front by customer service and then the secret ones in the back that crazy moms like me go to.) Her face was rife with concern for me… and by that I mean she looked like she would do anything to make my baby shut up.

One great thing about Walmart is that you can pretty much be rung up anywhere in the store. If you can find an employee that is. Baby Jesus smiled on me and there was one lovely, hair-lipped employee that was a beautiful ray of sunshine in my day. She didn’t judge the naked, red-faced banshee screaming from the front of me. She rang me up quickly, promised she wouldn’t put the things in my sad, waiting cart away and had a super sympathetic look on her face. Without her I don’t think I could have continued to pretend that my day was still awesome.

Things start to get less intense after this. We go back to the bathroom and I get my screaming Mimi into the new outfit. He still won’t calm down so we plop down on the bench next to the sinks and I nurse him. I feel a wet spot blooming on the side he’s not nursing on. We are now, officially covered in more bodily fluids than an episode of CSI.

But on the bright side, the baby carrier will cover it.

And on the bright side, Walmart sells wine.

And on the bright side, we survived.