There's an ongoing slogan bandied about between my wife and me regarding the impending arrival of our first child. The slogan has several different variants to better reflect each unique circumstance we encounter, but at its heart, it goes: "our lives are about to get 50 percent more gross."
Whether she's cleaning the toilet, or I'm cleaning the litter box, or we're taking turns cleaning up the latest hot pile of cat sick, we know, as gross as these tasks may be, our lives are inevitably going to be 50 percent more gross once the baby arrives.
I've tried to mentally prepare for the reality of changing diapers, to say nothing of the horrific (I'm sorry, "wonderful") world of the childbirth process itself, but as creative as my mind normally can be, it just repeatedly falls short of adequately envisioning the disgusting (yet "life affirming") adventure on which we're about to embark.
Oh, sure, the baby marketing powers that be do their best to try and make babies sound fun, even magical. However, I don't care how magical a "Diaper Genie" may be; deep down I know it's a trash can for dirty diapers. Also, they may have scored a coup when they labelled what are essentially spit-up rags "receiving blankets," but I'm onto the scam. Yeah, they're receiving SOMETHING all right.
Thankfully, our two righteously disgusting cats are doing their part to prepare us for the impending increased grossness that will no doubt be delivered by the new human fecal-production machine that's about to bless our lives.
Last week, for example, both cats were sleeping on the bed with me, since my wife is now so incredibly pregnant she has her own gravitational field and requires her own bed entirely to herself.
One of the cats, showing feline affection as only cats can, extended its paw and pressed it against my lips, an act which woke me up briefly, but I quickly fell back asleep. When I awoke again a few minutes later, I bit down and immediately realized I was crunching on granules of kitty litter, which had apparently lodged in the cat's paw and had been transferred into my mouth.
The cats both seemed genuinely nonplussed by my reaction to a mouthful of kitty litter, which included gargling violently with water, swearing considerably and spitting on the floor. The cats were just trying to help, after all, doing their part to prepare me for the grossness of fatherhood.
Despite their "help," what I really wanted at that exact moment was a "Cat Genie," which unfortunately hasn't been invented yet.
Posted by Ryan at September 1, 2009 12:01 PM | TrackBackWith two gross machines to my credit, your preparation will still not prepare you for the child's first BM, black meconium, and later the dijon mustard diapers.
And the diaper genie? it's a poop sausage maker.
Posted by: MojoMark at September 1, 2009 12:28 PMAlso, fifty percent is really optimistic. Your lives are about to get a hundred and fifty percent more gross. I mean, ask yourself this question -- when was the last time you had another human being's shit on your hands? You have a kid, that's going to be a daily experience.
And you can't get that stuff out of the house fast enough, believe me. Your whole house will smell like shit for at least two years.
Plus -- and this is my favorite part -- you have to clean shit off the baby. You have to clean it off yourself, you have to clean it off the baby. Frequent baby-baths help, but they sometimes poop in the tub, which can be problematic for a wide variety of reasons.
I'll take this opportunity to relay the parenting lesson passed on to me by my friend Jen --
"When the baby starts to smell like cheese, it's time for a bath."
Posted by: Joshua at September 13, 2009 07:06 PMJoshua, you have a gift of taking me from just casually nervous about impending fatherhood and escalading it straight up to outright dread.
Posted by: Ryan at September 14, 2009 01:15 PMI'm here to help, yo.
Posted by: Joshua at September 14, 2009 05:08 PM
Stumble It!
