Too Much Poop

I will admit that it has felt a bit like the universe has been plotting against us lately. There have been too many goodbyes lately. In the last sixty days we have lost Silky, Largo, Stormy and Dutch. I know it is part and parcel of having a retirement farm. I also know it tends to go this way sometimes. We’ve experienced this before where we go for a long period without having to say goodbye, only to find ourselves saying goodbye several times. Nonetheless, it hasn’t been much fun. Of course in the middle of all this my mom, sister and I sold our family farm. I told Jason it was getting to the point where I was scared to get up in the morning.

To add insult to injury our big tractor decided that it would be great time to develop a major hydraulic leak. We had already been ignoring a very minor transmission fluid leak. Jason knew that repairing the transmission fluid leak would involve splitting the tractor in half and then putting it back together again. As the saying goes, ain’t nobody got time for that. That is, until we found ourselves in the position of having to make time for that with the hydraulic issues. Thus, in the middle of saying two goodbyes in a row last week, our tractor was hauled off to get repaired. I don’t even want to know what that repair bill is going to look like.

Bye bye tractor, enjoy your expensive vacation

By Saturday afternoon my nerves were pretty well shot. Carter was up at the front barn with me Saturday afternoon, “helping” me feed horses. He was outside playing while I was inside scooping out feed. Then I heard him calling, “mommyyyyy, mommmyyyy, MOOOMMMYYYYY.” I asked him what he needed and he said he needed to go poopie. I asked him if he could wait a few minutes or if it was an emergency. He said it could wait a few minutes so I carried on with scooping out feed.

I walked outside with my hands full of feedbags just as Carter was pulling his shorts up while standing in front of the barn. “Never mind mommy,” he said proudly, “I already went poopie.” He proudly pointed at his poop right in front of the barn on the driveway. I made a mental note to myself to put on disposable gloves and dispose of Carter’s poop. Carter has never cared to poop anywhere but the potty in the last 18 months, that is before that moment. I hoped we weren’t starting a new trend of indescriminate potty choices, but I couldn’t muster up the energy to care.

We carried on with our day and the incident was forgotten. At least it was temporarily forgotten until the next day. Carter and I were walking up to the barn and he ran in front of me, leaned over, and picked something up. He turned around and said “what’s this mommy?” as he held up his poop from the day before, now dried out from the sun.

I was mortified. In a spectacular parenting fail I shouted at Carter to put it down. He dropped his poop and started crying, confused as to why I was yelling at him. I was reminded of the scene at the swimming pool in Caddyshack, a movie I haven’t seen in a million years. I was thinking of the scene where the kid drops a candy bar in the pool, maybe a Twix bar, and someone sees it floating by and screams, and points at the “poop.” Then everyone starts screaming and there is the mad dash, mass exodus from the pool thanks to the Twix bar. Except in my case Carter wasn’t holding a Twix bar, it really was poop, and I was the first kid in the pool that started screaming “poooop!!”

We washed Carter’s hands thoroughly while mommy apologized for yelling at him. This time mommy remembered to put on latex gloves and properly dispose of the poop. Overall, life has had a little too much poop in it lately. Hopefully we’re done pooping on the driveway for awhile.

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Ritchie and Rip