I can’t even try to be witty or funny or cool about this. My kid crapped in our ball pit. It was as awful as it sounds. But before I go into the gory details, let me back up a second – we have a ball pit. Not some little kid blow up thing with a dozen balls. Oh no, my husband went crazy a few years ago and purchased something like 500 plastic balls and put them in our travel crib (which is the phil n teds and quite a handy little thing, but that’s another post). Here it is:

The big brother (not the pooper!) enjoying a clean ball pit about a year ago!

So yeah, we have a ball pit full of quite a lot of plastic balls. And my kid pooped in it. It’s not as if I’m an idiot and let me not-quite-two-year-old run around without a diaper. No, he was wearing a diaper. And shorts. He just decided to save up his poop for three days and let it loose all at once while playing in the ball pit…at the exact moment I stepped out of the room. It filled the diaper…and his shorts, and oozed out the top and down his legs. Of course I knew the second I walked in – the smell. Oh dear god the smell…

I’ve blocked out a lot of what happened but I do believe I managed to scream “DON’T TOUCH THE BALL PIT!” to my big kids as I ran with a poop-dripping baby. Obviously, and thankfully, there are no pics from the next 15 minutes. I did end up doing an entire load of laundry just from this one incident, Burke got a shower, and I had to use a nail brush to get the poop out from under my nails. Yep, a nail brush.

But back to the ball pit. It was bad. Again, thankfully, no pics. It took me another 30 minutes to clean all the balls and it involved my large clawfoot soaking tub (my poor tub!), more bleach than I care to admit, many many rinses, and lots of yelling “don’t touch that!” and “out of the bathroom!”. Oh, and a kid knocking over a giant plant somehow and spilling dirt all over the floor in the midst of this. Because, apparently, cleaning poop up for 45 minutes isn’t enough, the universe wanted me to vacuum today too.

Oh well, the crap is all cleaned up now and we all seem to have survived. Such is the life of a mom. If you don’t like cleaning up poop, I suggest you do not have kids. They poop. A LOT. And at the most inconvenient times and in the most interesting places. And if you have a ball pit, learn from my mistake: if they haven’t pooped in three days, the ball pit is off limits!