Everyone poops

Here's the thing. For the last seven or eight weeks or so, Jake has been going through some serious episodes of diarrhea. I won't go into details, but just think green, runny, foulest smelling thing you can ever imagine. And then picture it in a diaper. Mike took him to the doctor last week and they said it could be a parasite (ick!) or some sort of bacteria living in his tummy. So, they gave us a stool sample kit. The kit had three sample vials in it each with its own nifty little collection spoon. The object was to get three samples of poo from one diaper.

Mike immediately told me I would be responsible for the collection. I said okay, because I've had collections before. I collected roly poly's and ladybugs when I was a kid. As an adult, I collect little glass dolphins and obsessive compulsive tendencies. Collecting things is not a problem for me. I knew it would be gross but I've done gross before. In college I volunteered for a marine mammal rescue program which mainly consisted of "rescuing" dead dolphins washed up on the beach. Trust me when I say there is nothing grosser in life than the smell of a decomposing dolphin. Words cannot describe. Words can also not describe my horror one day when we were doing necropsies on one unfortunate bottlenose dolphin and another volunteer accidentally dropped its head on the beach and the rotting brains fell out and then he (the volunteer) sort of stepped in them. There was an audible squish. It was gross. I also spent five years in California performing dissections of mackeral which are perhaps the foulest smelling fish on the planet. What I'm saying is I've smelled gross before.

However, I was not pregnant for any of the aforementioned happenings. So anyway, a week ago I got Jake up and took off his dirty diaper and took it to the kitchen table to perform my collection. It has taken me a week to write about this because the memory is still so painful. I filled one vial up and started convulsing and gagging and carrying on. To which Mike said "uh, honey, you okay?" My knight. I said "uh, I think I'm going to throw up so you will have to finish this thing." I felt like a failure calling in the backup quarterback or something. (Good thing my backup did a lot better job than Brad Johnson has done for Tony Romo). So my husband had to get out his gas mask and put it on to finish our little collection.

All that to say that the test came back negative. Which is good. Except that they want us to do it two more times just to make sure. I will seriously pay someone to come over and do this thing for us. Any takers?