Being a Dad Makes You Do Crazy Things

I'm not talking about "murdering your children" crazy, I mean "write run-on sentences" crazy.

Average Joe has absolutely no idea. He won't know "crazy" until his baby learns how to remove his own diaper. Let me give him (and any other interested parties) a free education in crazy.

One Saturday, I had a lot of studying to do, and my wife wanted to go to a thing for church. She took our son with her so I wouldn't have to lose homework time to babysitting, and they had babysitting at the church function anyway. Win-win situation, right? (Cue ominous music...)

Two hours into the four-hour church thing, she came home. It was noon, which is our son's nap time. She figured, quite reasonably, that she could come home, put kidd-o down for a nap, go back to the church thing, and I would still be able to study without any trouble. Sounded good at the time. She leaves, I keep studying. About fifteen minutes go by, and I can still hear kidd-o moving around upstairs. I decide to go upstairs and tell him to knock it off and take a nap. I open the door. I see my son sitting on the floor, smiling quite contentedly. He isn't wearing his diaper anymore. Oh no...

He had taken off his diaper, which was full of very foul-smelling poop. Despite the smell, he had reached into the stinking pile of his own feces, pulled out several hands full, and smeared it in his hair. And on his pillow. And all over his sheets. And he looks at me, and he's just smiling. Like he's thinking, "Look dad, I've smeared poop all over everything! Aren't you proud of me?"

As I said at the beginning of this post, being a dad makes you do crazy things. The rational thing to do under these circumstances would be either to murder him and quickly flee the state, or else to close the door again, wait for my wife to come home, feign ignorance when she discovered the mess for herself, and make her clean it up. But get this: I simply picked him up, stuck him in the bathtub, and calmly - without screaming once - put his pillow-case, sheets, etc. in the washing machine.

If anyone had told me that fatherhood would involve that kind of thing, I might still be single.