I'm so glad it's my birthday, I mean, poop day...

Do you want to know what I did last night? (How could you not, given what you know about my lifestyle and my obsession with spending time wherever you can find half-asleep old people?)

Well, last night, I went to a party, big shot.

It was a poopy party. The first one I've ever attended. Jealous?

Let's go back in time to Sunday night, where we find our heroine, Scouty B, doubled over and in so much pain that I rushed her to Urgent Care. Her belly was hurting. "But not regular hurting," she told me, "it's need to go to the hospital hurting." At urgent care, a giant, gruff doctor with yellow fingertips lectured me on how it wasn't normal to bring a perfectly healthy little girl in for emergency care. Like maybe I was some kind of weird freak, like those Munchhausen bi-proxy people... for rushing my girl in to be examined, when by the time we got there she was fine. Totally fine.

It was a rookie mistake. The kind of thing I laugh over. "How stupid we were when Scouty was a baby! We rushed her to the hospital for everything, haha, idiots..." Thank god we're so much more experienced and knowledgeable, now. I basically walked into the Urgent Care center and shrugged and threw up my hands. Why does she seem fine? You tell me, doc. I didn't go to medical school.

There was nothing wrong, except that Scouty hadn't pooped that day. Hm, or maybe the day before. We were out all weekend, and nobody had bothered to take notes about her bathroom habits, imagine that. (I blame Kurt.)

But then she didn't poop on Monday, either.

By Tuesday, she was a sobbing, sorry and pathetic little creature with red, sticky cheeks and pleading eyes that said to me, "make this better, mommy."

So we sat all morning in the bathroom, which was no picnic for any of us, including a very crabby and very neglected Louise. There is really only so much for a baby to do on an only moderately clean bathroom floor. Mostly, she spent the day attempting to put her mouth onto things while I ran interception.

At lunch time, levels of constipation and crabbiness reached a terrible sort of frenzy where I called Kurt at work and broke into tears. "What? I can't hear you," he said. Thank goodness both of my girls were crying louder, to cover for me. I administered a series of herbs and oils and concoctions and we tried, oh how we tried.

Eventually, I started promising her the world.

"As soon as you poop, we'll go straight to the toy store and you can pick out anything you want," I said. "You can have candy, too." Looking down at her scared, sad little face was more than I could bear. "As soon as you poop," I told her. "I'm throwing you a party! We'll have a big party with presents and cake and --"

"Can we invite Grammy?" she asked.

"Yes, okay. And we'll invite Grammy," I said.

When she still hadn't pooped by nightfall, and Kurt was late coming home, I panicked again and started dressing myself and the girls to go back to the emergency room. Thank God my mother showed up, just as I was balancing both of my children on my hips and trying to slip my feet into my shoes. "Let's all just try to relax and get back to our regular lives," she said.

Relax? Our regular lives? Just look at those big, sad eyes, Grammy. There's no relaxing here. But, then we did, and it worked better than obsessing and panicking, I admit begrudgingly.

Well, the next day, I went to the store and left my phone in the car, because phones have magical properties when you do that. I knew that if I bought a few things and came back and looked, there would be a voicemail waiting for me, from a triumphant Daddy.

And so I shopped slowly, dragging out the agonizing anticipation, and when I got back to the car, that voicemail was really there!

Poopy Party time. There were presents. There were fruit tarts from our favorite bakery. There were party hats, and we invited Grammy. You should have been there.

Scouty kept saying, "I'm so happy it's my birthday! I mean... poop day!"

(Let this be an historical record for when she's thirty years old and has to explain to her therapist how exactly she developed such an... interesting relationship with her bowels and their functioning. I'm pretty sure this kind of story is the kind of thing I should be documenting to embarrass her in front of her high school boyfriend, right?)



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