What Do Crabs Eat? And other pressing questions of our time
What’s up gamers, currently coming at you live from the ceiling-to-floor windowed living room of a Park Slope apartment juiced up on angel investor funds. It’s nice to see the early stages of the startup lifecycle. Hoping I have a real job before the other shoe drops and belts get tighter around here.
So I’m back with Princess Elsa right now, which rocks, because she is constantly putting evil curses upon my next of kin (God help her, she does not want my face to be the last thing she sees before falling asleep at night, and there’s nothing I love more than a woman with standards)! Whenever I babysit here I’m always amazed at how badly other people can fuck up grocery shopping. I think there are two slabs of meat, some old cucumbers, and five different kinds of milk in their fridge right now. The freezer is an even scarier place that I don’t venture into after a cursory (and often failed) search for ice cream. I know that Princess Elsa is feeling this pain, too, because the last time I babysat her, I brought an apple (knowing the dire situation that awaited me), and she pounced on that mf so quick! I hadn’t even gotten to it yet and she hit me with her classic “can I have a bite?” And her mom was RIGHT there so I was not about to say no. So I let her have a bite and then she literally just kept going… I was horrified. End scene, I did not have dinner that evening.
I’ve decided to start a new segment—The Poop Highlight Reel—since pretty much all of my stories these days can be traced back in one way or another to a fecal incident of some kind. Here are some memorable ones since the last time I wrote:
I’m babysitting the 6 y/o (W) and 4 y/o (O) that I watch every week. O can’t fall asleep unless I’m held hostage in the bottom bunk with him, so that’s what we were doing. W is taking forever in the bathroom. Suddenly: “I just licked my poop!” I don’t buy this—W has been trying to convince me all day that he has done this before. A follow up: “It kinda tastes like hand sanitizer.” This is too weird of a detail for a first grader to just conjure up. I am now completely fucking alarmed. I respond with a plea, a hopeful manifestation: “No you didn’t.” O runs out of the room to meet his brother. I pull up to the bathroom door just in time to watch his tongue meet the toilet paper. I see my life flash before my eyes. I never yell at the kids I babysit—I truly don’t think it corrects any behavior, just scares them—but I was really fucking close with this one. 5 minutes later, as he’s brushing his teeth for the third time (court-ordered sentence), he’s crying at me, begging me not to tell his mom. I’m sitting there like, you think I WANT to tell your mom this? Would that I could, I’m taking this to the grave, this is between us and your GI tract buddy. We have both failed here tonight. Thankfully we have not had a poop-tasting incident since, which I am grateful for every day.
Princess Elsa is getting potty trained these days, let’s go queen. This has not meant that she’s dropping deuces and aces in the toilet, though. Rather, she’s just started announcing when she’s making use of her diaper. Tonight, for example. I’m about halfway through reading the most epic story about Peppa Pig going on vacation when she turns to me with a smirk on her face and goes: “I am making pee in my diaper” (If you’ll remember, her first language is French so she’s saying all of this in the most ridiculous French accent). Like what am I supposed to say to that? Rock on? Me too? When this happens I’ll ask her if she wants to use the toilet instead, which always gets a no, but maybe one day she’ll switch it up on me.
O is having explosive diarrhea. Been there king. Because he has not yet mastered wiping his own butt (and he gets lonely), I’m in there with him. As all young children one day do, he has recently discovered the power of question words. And as all young children one day do, he is hyper-fixating on the deep sea. So we’re chilling in the bathroom, he’s making some inhumane sounds, and I’m fending off question after question of “What do crabs eat?” and “How long are great white sharks?” Eventually, it was ruled that my expertise was not good enough, and we had to phone a friend (his brother W down the hallway)—so now they’re shouting animal stats back and forth (Q: “What’s the most dangerous frog?” A: “The poison dart frog”). W has clearly done his homework. I am outmatched. I accept defeat and take my runner-up prize of wiping O’s poopy butt when he is done. Fin.
My hand washes per diem ratio has never been so high, I’ll tell you that.
One last sweet anecdote before I sign off here. O has, for some time now, been obsessed with dried mango. Fair enough, probably suspect #1 for that diarrhea. But I think that dried mango was his first introduction to mango as a concept, because when I picked him up from daycare the other day, he says to me: “can I have wet mango as a snack?” Wet mango? What could this possibly mean? I realize he just means regular old mango, normal fruit, not dried, wet. Genius. Their local grocery store does not carry wet mango—massive tragedy—but we are still fighting the good fight (my grocery store has wet mangoes so I’ve been shuttling them to him like a cross-neighborhood mango mule).
Wishing many blessings and wet mangoes to you on this Good Friday,
I’m making pee in my diaper,
It tastes like hand sanitizer,
This has been a Dispatch from the Nannysphere <3