Thursday, January 24, 2008

God even speaks through the poo

Life with a crazy awesome kid is always eventful...to say the least. I had always wondered what God would teach me through her. I've asked God frequently to help me to learn from her. Maybe that wasn't the best idea...
You see, the other night, Hannah pooped, reached into her diaper and smeared it everywhere. (because that's the only logical thing to do, right?) It was unbelievably disgusting. I walked in to see poop smeared all over the front of her hot pink PJ's, but that was the least of my worries. Hannah decided to be inspired by all of her friends at the spa: she gave her hair poop highlights and she basically looked as though she had tried to give herself a manicure and pedicure in poop as well. She was screaming and crying and waving her poopy hands around in the air... like she just don't care... The smell alone was enough to encourage my dinner to start to make a return appearance from my stomach. It was the most obscenely disgusting scene I had ever beheld. And it was MY daughter somewhere in that poopy mess.
But like I said, she was terrified and she longed for me to hold her and tell her that she would be okay. I'm not gonna lie, I thought for at least 3 seconds about trying to find some other way to comfort her. I did not want to be covered in poop myself. But when I saw that scared, "Mommy, I am having some serious trouble here" look in her eyes, every thought went out the window (if only the smell had as well) and I pulled my daughter into my arms as poop continued to overtake our bodies. I couldn't just stand there. This little poop covered girl is the love of my life. She owns my heart. I love her more than almost anything else. And when she was hurting, I couldn't care what it meant for me. I had to help her. I had to let her know that I would go through the poop with her.
She cried for a few minutes while I just held her and tried to sing her a song to quiet her down. And though it was a terribly intricate and painful process, Ted and I slowly cleaned off every portion of poop and ran her through the shower and went to every possible disinfecting technique we could come up with. She cried. I don't know if it hurt her or scared her or she was just so overcome with the emotion that consumes you when you find yourself covered in poo, but she wailed throughout our thorough cleaning process. But we couldn't stop... We couldn't just leave her like that. We couldn't just clean her up part of the way. And though she cried and cried, we slowly and surely cleaned her up, disinfected her, her room and we rocked her back to sleep. I learned a lot that day. It was pretty amazing. I realized a piece of who I am and who God is. I realized a lot of what Jesus went through for me and a lot of what my healing process has looked like. So there ya go, lessons from the crib.

Disclaimer: I do not recommend or wish that any of you ever has to go through that. Just let God speak to you through our ordeal...

Side note: Hannah is with me right now as I'm about to post this - and she just started to poop. Timing in life is full of hilarity.

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