River and I were up until about 2:00 am this morning, and thus felt a little groggy getting up for work/school/etc. today. For some reason, on weekdays, our kids will occasionally sleep in until 8:00 with seemingly no problem at all, whereas on the weekend, they will awaken at 6:00 no matter how late they may have gone to bed. Today I think even the early-riser was sleeping as late as 7:30, which is highly unusual.
At any rate I stumbled downstairs, without my glasses on, to grind some coffee beans. I encountered a mound of runny cat poop in a doorway near the kitchen. Sometimes these show up when one of the cats has an axe to grind about the litter situation. It’s a form of picketing, a non-violent protest. I ignored the cat poop on the premise that I couldn’t really see it, I wasn’t fully awake (and therefore did not qualify as a competent cleaner-upper), and I was occupied with grinding coffee beans, which took all of my blurry concentration.
River, freshly-showered, stumbled downstairs next, and I warned him not to step in the cat poop. “It’s throw-up,” he said.
“What do I know, I can’t see it,” I replied. Why argue? (It was poop. I could smell it.) River went about the ugly task of cleaning it up, as I slipped away upstairs to shower. Such is the nature of things in our house: I am very good with coming up with reasons for things, a quality I was born with, and the reason my parents often told me I would make a good lawyer. (Not exactly praise, mind you.)
Later, River left home and I was juggling a few children in the house to ferry off to school in record time. As I passed the large coat closet, something caught my eye: more cat poop, on a kid’s fleece jacket that had been left on the floor of the closet. Nice. With the small gaggle of children around me I didn’t want to make a scene, but I also didn’t want to just leave it there. I had an appointment right after dropping off the kids and didn’t want to have to take care of this in between.
So I dove in, picked up the jacket as swiftly as I could, and without saying anything to the kids—I might have even been humming, or still engaging them in bubbly conversation, as they are, without fail, perky in the morning—I spirited the jacket through the kitchen to the laundry room, balancing the very disgusting blob of cat poop on the sleeve of the jacket. (Nice aim.) I placed it very carefully on the laundry room countertop, thus making it a lot easier for myself to dash back after dropping off the kids, and do whatever I needed to do to clean the garment.
Or so I thought.
Just as I lay the jacket on the countertop, I heard Paolo exclaim, “Ew! You’re stepping in it!” I turned around quickly to discover all three kids (two of mine, plus our neighbor) standing around the rug in front of the kitchen sink, all staring at the floor. On the rug: a large blob of runny cat poop. On the floor far from the first blob: a second. The kids started walking all around as though they were in a field of land mines. (Effectively, they were.) I took note that they weren’t exactly leaving the room; instead they were just circulating, as though there was something to watch.
“Go out the back door. Now!” I ordered. One of them, predictably, stood in the way, transfixed, while the other two had to make additional maneuvers to get around her. While chastising her for this, I looked at my boot, which had a neat little smear of cat poop across the side of one toe, and a neat little chunk of it embedded into the treads. In one smooth motion I swiveled my leg up and into the kitchen sink, didn’t even try to angle my foot, and just ran cold water over the entire foot of my leather boot, until the poop was mostly rinsed off. The kids exited through the back door and I cursed myself for thinking I could take care of this quickly. Now I had to return and pick up blobs of poop, two known, and who-knows-how-many-more unknown. Nasty.
Outside, the kids loaded into the van. I got in and started the ignition. “Ew, the smell!” Paolo exclaimed. I checked my boot. Yeah, still kinda gross. I got out again, wiped my foot in the snow a bunch, then got back in. “It still smells!” Paolo exclaimed again.
Our neighbor, riding in the very back seat, exclaimed to Council, “I see it on your coat! It’s on the back!” Council grumbled and protested. I asked her to check her coat. She said there was nothing on it. I told her to turn around. Sure enough, there were smears of cat poop on the hood of her coat. I got out again, walked around to the side door and had her step out.
Still trying to remain collected and calm, I told her, “No problem, we’ll just unzip your hood, like this, see?” She grumbled and protested more.
“But I’ll be cold!”
“Would you rather be cat-poopy?” I finished unzipping, and flung the poopy hood into the snow-covered back yard. As River said to me one day, observing me tossing an empty Poland water bottle into the yard before leaving to get somewhere (we were late), we are very ghetto.
Paolo insisted that it still smelled bad in the van. Council said it was probably him. He said it was her. This continued until we got to the school, which only took four minutes. As they got out, I wished them all a non-poopy day.
When I picked them up again at the end of the schoolday, I asked them (whispering in their ears) if they had found any more poop on their jackets. Council mentioned that she smelled it a little more again when she put her jacket on. When we got home, in the soft blue afternoon light at the front of the house, I finally spotted a large, faint smear of poop on her left sleeve. I had her extract the coat, very carefully. Then I noticed another large smear across the front of the jacket, barely discernible. I have no idea how it got there.