I Did Not Sign Up For This

**Gross out alert.** If you have a low tolerance for grossness, please beware of this post.

I am not a squeamish person. I do what needs to be done in the gross-out department. I have cleaned up so many ungodly awful messes involving all sorts of bodily fluids and other nastiness, I really shouldn’t be objecting to one more horror being added to the list. Really, gross stuff is just part of motherhood. I accept it. I dare say, I welcome it - it provides great stories for my children’s teenage years for embarrassment purposes.

But I have drawn a line in the gross stuff sand.

I have reached my limit.

And that limit is having to pull a semi-digested, half-expelled, poop covered baby wipe out of my dog’s ass because her poop muscles do not have the capacity to poop out the entire length of a baby wipe and she just let it hang there. And that thing was not coming back into my house until that baby wipe was fully removed from her butt.

The sad thing is, I know exactly how this happened. We had an incredibly messy dinner of ravioli a couple of nights ago. The kids loved it. My son loved it so much, he rubbed his entire head in red sauce. He looked like a hairless oompa-loompa. He was so dirty, I had to switch from washcloths to baby wipes because I ran out of clean washcloths. Then I threw the dirty baby wipes in the trash can. (In retrospect, I should have just carried him to the bathroom and hosed him down with the hand-held shower head.)

Sometime in the night, the dog ate the baby wipes, unbeknownst to me. And she almost got away with it. Until I saw her duck-walking in the back yard with what looked like a four inch piece of poop hanging out of her butt. When she caught my eye, she knew she was in trouble and tried to hide under a lawn chair.

Here’s the thing. I can try to say "I put my foot down - too gross" or refuse to deal with it, but I can’t. Who else is going to deal with this? It’s not like I can send out the 15 month old and say, "Go pull that thing out of the dog’s butt. Come on - it’ll be good for you. Make you a man." I can’t exactly call my friends or neighbors and explain the situation. "Yeah . . . do you have a minute? My dog has a poop-covered baby wipe hanging out of her butt and if you could just . . . . hello? Hello?"

I know it is incredibly shallow of me to wish I was married so my husband could do the gross things . . . I mean, I know marriage is about a whole lot more than who gets to do the gross stuff . . . but sometimes, I just wish I was able to see the poop-covered baby wipe hanging out of the dog’s ass and look over to my husband and say, "Enjoy yourself, honey. Wash your hands with bleach when you’re done."