Going from one child to three with the birth of the twins a year ago has been challenging. Someone once made what I have since found to be a dead-on analogy between the number of little kids you have and basketball defense. When there are two parents and one child, you can double-team. Two and two, you can play man to man. But once it is two adults to three kids, you are forced to go to a zone defense.
For several months each Spring my wife Deanna is frequently away on business one or two nights a week. I'm not sure there is a decent basketball analogy for when it goes to three on one. More like a hockey team where my team has two players in the penalty box. I just go into penalty-killing mode until they (or in this case she) comes back again.
Mostly, these nights are routine enough and fairly fun. Other times, they break down into chaos. No matter how well you baby proof, there will be things you can't control when it is three on one. My favorite example of this happened a couple of months ago. I set out to give all three boys baths at once. I had Hayden (then 10 months) stripped first and in the tub when I noticed floating poop. This, of course, precipitated getting him out, draining the tub, and starting over. Tedious but necessary. I put Hayden back in, stripped Cooper (also 10 months) and was about to put him in too when I noticed poop stains on his feet. Although in retrospect I should have gotten more suspicious at that point as to where this was all coming from, trying to bath three little kids at once does not lend itself well to measured deductive reasoning. So, I took a quick look around, saw nothing that would really explain it, got his feet cleaned up and put him in.
Later on, after baths and preoccupied with getting the other two boys ready for bed, I went looking for Hayden, already in his PJ's, and found him sitting by the bathroom sink with a handful of shit and incriminating stains around the mouth area, including of course a literal "shit-eating grin". After sweeping out his mouth with my finger, I placed a panicked call to Deanna in her hotel three hours away, asking, theoretically, if one of the babies had eaten poop, whether the baby would be okay. After she confusedly replied that she supposed so as it was organic but what the hell was going on, I told her things were too chaotic to talk now and hung up. She really enjoyed that. I became suspicious of four year old Owen after I spied whole kernels of corn in the evidence, something the babies had not been chowing down on in recent days (CSI: Chicago). Owen initially claimed the poop must have been Cooper's, but eventually confessed that maybe it had been his. He said that earlier in the day, he had used the bathroom, and while he was subsequently busy washing his hands and "making faces in the mirror" some more "may have come out". I'm not sure why pants hadn't been pulled up at that point. Or why one wouldn't take a good look around on the floor to verify whether "some more" had indeed come out. The offending matter had apparently bounced off the little stool (no pun intended) Owen stands on to use the sink and underneath an overhang where the cabinets under the sink jut out so as to be not so visible to an adult but apparently in plain and tempting view of those under three feet tall.
Hayden, thankfully, suffered no apparent ill effects, by the way.
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