A Dose of Humor – Blowoutfits

5 Minutes for Parenting’s weekly column, A Dose of Humor, is here to remind you to take your humor pill regularly as the best medicine to treat the side effects of parenting! It features a different blogger every week and is hosted by Rachel at Grasping for Objectivity in My Subjective Life.

This week is a story from my own archives…embarrassing for me, amusing for you. Which, come to think of it, would probably be the category for most of my posts.

Nobody likes dealing with a blowout.

(let me take a minute to define – “Blowout: bloe-out v. – an infant or toddler’s poop that exceeds their diaper in such a way as to leach out onto EVERY item of clothing that they are wearing, along with whatever they are sitting on and eating at the time of blow. Example of such cited here”)

But after cleaning up the current mess and moving on with life, there’s always the issue of the clothing affected.

That horrible, horrible mess that is the blowoutfit.

HOPEFULLY it was just the child’s clothing and not yours as well, but, whether immediately or later (if you’re not home), it must be dealt with.

I thought that Ali was out of this stage until a couple of Sundays ago when we picked Ali up from Sunday School. I picked her up to give her a hug, and immediately noticed something missing.

“Where are her bloomers??”

Chris dug around in her diaper bag and found them in one of the dreaded produce bags that are used at our church to seal toxic waste.

But that’s not what I’m here to tell you about. HERE’S the real story:

Sometime last summer, Ali was wearing an outfit that happened to be Chris’ favorite. It was pink camo – a Daddy sort of outfit. (The picture is of the outfit, but not the day it happened. It’s just for your visual reference.)

I don’t remember all of the details, but I know that we were on a trip somewhere. Anyway, she had one of the aforementioned blowouts.

It significantly compromised both the shorts and the shirt.

Nasty bad.

Stinky.

Messy.

Miserable.

Since we were out of town and not somewhere where I could immediately clean them, I put them in a Gallon Ziploc bag that I had on hand for such an occasion, and sealed it up.

We got home, and as I was unpacking, I was reminded of her issue when I found the lucky bag.

It was late, I was tired from a long trip home, and the last thing I wanted to do was to open up that bag, now looking especially appetizing what with the stinky steam fogging up the inside of it, and clean up that now settled-in-to-stay toxic poo mess.

But I knew how much her Daddy liked her to wear that outfit, so I didn’t just throw it out, even though the temptation was high.

I set it on top of the washer and vowed to deal with it the next day.

However, sometime between that moment and “Tomorrow is another day”, the bag managed to slip down in between some things in the laundry room. And since it wasn’t exactly something that I was looking forward to making a happy memory while doing, I forgot all about it.

Fast forward from last year to LAST WEEK.

I was getting our beach towels out of the laundry room to get ready for our trip, and lo and behold, what was underneath those beach towels?

A Ziploc bag.

And, although the pink camo was in and of itself completely camouflaged by spotted mold, hairy mold, brown mold, black mold, and green mold, my mind immediately knew what it was.

Oops.

Now at this point I would normally have a grotesquely nauseating picture of the VERY SEALED Ziploc bag for you.

However, in my haste to destroy the evidence and REMOVE THAT EVIL THING FROM MY SIGHT, I threw it away before my blog-instincts kicked in.

I haven’t admitted my trespasses to Chris yet, although I have been keeping an eye out for a new Pink Camo outfit.

No luck.

Let me know if you see one. Size 2T. And preferably NOT covered in mold or poo, or moldy poo.

While Rachel is shirking her cleanliness and laundry duties, she is blogging at Grasping for Objectivity in My Subjective Life.