I discovered a few entries I wrote when we were living at our previous house.  Neve was about 2, Emily was 6, and we still had Zelda the dog.   Enjoy.

It’s 4 am.  My alarm will be going off at 5:15 to get up and go to work, so I am not too happy when I feel two little hands nudging at me from the side of the bed.  Little Nebby’s cute, groggy whine comes next, and it is too irresistible for me to ignore.  As stressed out and exhausted as I am, I can’t resist snuggle time with my baby.  I pull her into bed with me, wrap myself around her and pull the blankets over the both of us.  In my half wakeful state I envision us both nodding back off relatively quickly, all warm and lovey.  Somewhere in between kissing her head and heading back to dream land  I sense that there is a smell to her that’s not quite so nice as the lingering Baby Magic scent from her bath earlier.  It’s more of a poop variety smell.  Well, I figure, this must be why she woke up.  Poopie diapers will do that, though night poops hadn’t been part of her routine for quite some time. 

“You gots poopoos in your diaper, baby?” I coo into her sweetly scented hair.  I feel her shake her head “no”.  A few kisses later, I try again.  “Nebby, you gots poopoos in your diaper”.

“No”, she says again.  “My feet.  Zelda poop, my feet”. 

I freeze with horror.  Then I snap to suddenly and whip on the lamp next to the bed.  I throw the blankets off of us so fast Neve has a stunned look on her face.  Sure enough,  poop.  All over Neve’s feet and ankles, and now, of course, my legs and the sheets and blankets on the bed.  There is nothing of note in her diaper, so I peer into the living room. I can barely make out dark brown spots all over the carpet.  I get up and turn on the living room light.  It’s everywhere, and it isn’t in nice solid pieces.  “Why can’t this dog just pick one spot to do her naughty business?!” I scream inside my head.

“Why does she have to make it look like she bombed the whole god damn house?!”

That, of course, seems to have been her objective that night.  Mushy dark brown poop was spread in small piles covering half the room.  There was no way Neve could have walked through and avoided it, especially in the dark.  I saw where there was a heel print in a pile near the room’s entryway, and more smears where Neve had walked through more of it and tracked it through the house and into my bedroom.  It was even smeared on the side of the bed.  Zelda eyed me warily from her spot next to the couch as I tried to scrub up the many squishy stinky piles all over my living room floor.  I had scrubbed Neve’s feet and legs, much to her chagrin, and changed the linens on the bed.  I was thoroughly disgusted and trying not to gag too much from the awfully rotten stench of this latest doggy indiscretion, and at the same time fuming over the fact that my alarm would be sounding soon to get out of bed.

“Fine” I seethed.  “I need a shower now anyway.  Fucking dog!”

My task done, Zelda is sent straight to her crate.  I resisted the powerful urge to issue her a one way ticket out the front door right then and there, but vowed she’d be living in her crate for the rest of her natural life.  At approximately 4:45 I have Neve asleep back in her bed and decide I will lay down for the last half hour allotted to me for the night.

That’s when I notice the big pee spot I’d somehow missed earlier.

Fucking dog.

 It’s quarter to 7.  I need to be leaving right now, but Neve is fighting me.  She doesn’t want to have her clothes put on her, and she is putting up some mighty resistance.

“I don’t want it!” she is shrieking.  She is mad and she is crying, and she is wiping tears and snot all over my clean and freshly pressed work clothes.  Emily is sitting on the love seat, her hands over her ears.

Miraculously I have her dressed and ready to go five minutes later.  All I need to do is take the dog out to pee and we can go.  I leave Neve on the couch sulking and grab the leash.  Zelda and I run outside. 

Two minutes later I return with a much “relieved” dog and am greeted by the sight of my precious little baby asleep on the couch where I left her, completely naked.

Wrestling match number two ensues.  I rush the kids out of the house, barking orders at Emily all the way to the car.  Neve is still shrieking.  Both girls buckled in, I turn to get in myself, only to see the neighbor’s dog trot over and happily deposit a nice steaming pile in my back yard, right next to the girls’ swing set. 

All the way to work I hope no one saw or heard me yell out a scream of utter desperation of anger before slamming my car door shut and speeding off toward day care. 

 On the way I thrust a cookie to Emily to eat, because I realized she had not brushed her teeth, and her breath reeked something awful.  The last thing I want is for the care providers to think I am a harried and disorganized mother (I am) or that I don’t pay attention to whether or not Emily has been practicing dental hygiene over the last few weeks (I haven’t).  A cookie, I figure, will mask the morning breath stench nicely.

I am repaid for this by the chocolate kiss Emily plants in the middle of my already tear and snot stained white blouse. 

Thus I head to work – hair in a frightening afro from the humidity and lack of enough time to apply necessary product, makeup mostly wrecked from sweating and baby wrestling, and my shirt nicely stained. 

Dear Mike,
Though in all likelihood you will never see this letter, I want you to know I watch your show regularly.  Your perfect comic timing and self deprecation provide me endless amusement.
This amusement is something I need desperately for, you see, I find myself stressed out by dirty situations on a fairly continual basis.
Examples from my week have been:
Dog poo and pee on the rug in my living room (she squatted right in front of me, and when I yelled, she ran, but the poop kept coming.  So it wound up in more than one “neat” little spot.
Half a container of mandarin oranges in the bathroom sink, along with poo smeared on the toilet seat, shredded toilet paper all over the floor and pee and poo encrusted toddler sized panties on the floor (this would be my filthy 4 year old, Neve at her not quite grossest.  She also specializes in destruction – like after she swiped her older sister’s school scisssors and my blue sharpie last night and had a grand old time with them in her bedroom)
Makeup manufactured specifically for children (I still don’t quite understand that) that is neither discreet in color nor “washable” as it is labeled – my 8 year old’s bright, horrendous “whore blue” eyeshadow all over the upstairs bathroom’s
floor, along with her “streetwalker red” lipstick smeared on the sink.  And more pee soaked 4 year old panties.  The only reason there wasn’t also huge dried globs of toothpaste all over the sink (and mirror, for some reason) is that I took their toothpaste away.
A sink full of dirty dishes that no one has bothered to scrape the food from, allowing them to emit quite a lovely and appetizing odor for the fruit flies, which have set up camp in my kitchen drains.
An overflowing garbage can that both older girls decided was too much trouble to be bothered with, and that the floor next to was better suited for their old tissues and napkins.
Dog poo all over the gravel driveway, because the damn dog has decided she’d rather go there than in the grass where she’s supposed to go.
Kitty litter in the shower – it gets caught in their paws, and they like to go in the shower when I am done so they can drink the water around the drain.
Some sort of liquified vegetable in the fridge.  I didn’t try too hard to identify it.
Huge piles of used coffee single serve “K-cups”, because my husband likes to cut them open and dump out the used coffee grounds for compost, except that he lets them pile up to mammoth proportions all over the counter until they are moldy first.
That’s all in the last 4 days or so.  And keep in mind that does not include the poopy diapers the baby produces daily.  Have I tried to keep my house clean and sanitized?  Yes.  Diligently.  Am I still afraid of what it looks like under my couch cushions and even worse, under the couch?  Definitely.  I have all but given up on ever having a clean house again.  I can spend an entire day and barely scratch the surface of it.  And then they’ll make an even grander mess once I am done anyway.
I am, more or less, a mother at her wit’s end, because taking care of my family? It’s a dirty job.