The Deuce Lip Kiss

It was an unsolicited response to a question that was never asked. I was simply sitting in my chair, drinking coffee and praying that an asteroid would obliterate the satellite that was currently beaming the kid show Hi-5 into our TV, when Lucy announced a very odd statement… “Actually dad, I just have poop on my thumb.”

My eyebrow goes up and my coffee goes down, I grab the remote and mute the TV. I’m almost positive Lucy just yelled out that she had poop on her thumb. It was still pretty early in the morning and the two things I hate to hear before I finish breakfast are… “Daddy, Ruby is drinking out of the toilet again,” and the ever so pleasant, “Daddy! I have poop on (insert body part, appliance or Ruby here).” I don’t immediately move, I never do. What I once considered an emergency, has now become so frequent, it’ll take no less than a gunshot, to get me moving. I stare down the hall and wait for some sort of confirmation. After a few seconds, Lucy emerged from the bathroom butt naked with her thumb in the air, a gesture that unfortunately validates her ridiculous statement. Seriously? This is how we’re gonna start the day?

“Actually dad, I just have some poop on my thumb.” She repeated the absurd sounding words again, but then she followed it up with, “But don’t worry, I wiped it off.” I believe this was her attempt at defusing the situation. I think, she thinks, that she was taking responsibility for her actions, but let’s be honest here, she’s three! Unless she secretly had Mr. Belvedere in there wiping the “poop” off of her thumb, I was now a little bit more than worried.

“What do you mean ‘you wiped’ it off?”
“Well, that means that I took it off my thumb.” I wonder as she explains the word “wiped” to me, what it was that I must have done to make her think I’m an idiot? Of course she might just be patronizing me, in any case she’s stalling…. I still haven’t moved.
“I understand you took it off of your thumb. I want to know how?” This question was gonna be the meat and potatoes of the conversation. I was either gonna commend her on being such a responsible and intelligent little girl, or I was gonna have to get out of my chair. “I wiped it on the bath towel.” And I was up.

As I walked down the hallway I shook my head knowing full well that we have two different colored towels in our house. We have white, and we have off-white. I enter the bathroom. Lucy is standing on the yellow bath mat, her hands are clasped together in front of her…she seems pleased. After a quick survey of the situation, I came to the conclusion that either I must have just missed a C.S.I Team, or The Seven Dwarfs stopped here after mining excursion. There hanging behind the door was an off-white towel with 15-20 little brown fingerprints smudged all over it.

“I thought you said you had poop on your thumb?” I’m still not sure exactly how the poop came to rest upon little Lucy’s thumb. But based solely on the amount of fecal matter imbedded into the towel, I could only assume that she was unfortunately standing behind a buffalo when it sharted and sneezed at the same time.
“Lu, how in the world did you get poop on your thumb?”
“I was trying to be a big girl and wipe all by myself.” Trying was the key word here, as it appeared she gave it several attempts.
“Okay fine, but why did you wipe it on the towel?”
“Because I didn’t want the poopie on my thumb.” There wasn’t much I could fault her for there. I cleaned her up, got her dressed and then did a load of off-whites.

9 ½ hours later….

(ring….)
“Lu, finish your porkchop.”
(ring….)
“Lu! Don’t give that to Ruby, she doesn’t have teeth!”
(ring…)
I pick up the phone…“Yeah?”
“Errrr, how many times do I have to tell you, I hate when you answer the phone like that!”
“What? You’re calling to ask me something aren’t you? I’m just skipping over all of the unnecessary pleasantries and allowing you to get right to the heart of the call. If you think about it, I’m actually doing you a favor.” Although my argument makes perfect sense, she is not amused.
“It’s just rude, maybe I just want to talk, or hear about your day a little. Is that too much to ask?”
“Fine, I’ll try to say ‘hello’ and be more pleasant. Anyway… why did you call? What do you need?”
“Do you guys want to meet me at the train?” I take into consideration everything that has to be done before we leave the house in order for an event like this to happen. Both girls are fed and Ruby has been bathed, this shouldn’t be a problem.
“Okay, call us when you get to Addison, then we’ll start walking.”

20 minutes later…

(ring…)
“Daddy I gotta go poopie.”
(ring…)
“I’m changing Ruby, I’ll be there when I’m done.”
(ring…)
I pick up the phone, “Yeah?”
“You did it again!” I seriously can’t help it. “I just left Addison.”
“Okay” I hang up the phone, grab Ru and head to the bathroom. I walk in and Lucy is standing in front of the toilet.
“Did you go potty?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you wipe?”
“No.” Considering the days previous event, I could totally understand why she wouldn’t want to wipe. What I couldn’t understand was why she wouldn’t wait for help. She had her pants pulled up! I check to make sure… yup, there was definitely some deuce in her pants. We hurry up and do a quick change of clothes, before scurrying out the door.

We were one block into our walk when Lucy stopped me and said, “Daddy, I promise I will never have poopie on my lip again.” Clearly there is some confusion of body parts, there is no way she has poop on her lip. I bend down, and upon further examination, I spot a smear of poop right between her nose and her upper lip. I don’t ask how it got there, quite frankly, I don’t want to know. I grab a napkin that was on the bottom of the stroller and wipe the residue off of her lip. We weren’t about to turn around now, I have too much invested into this walk.

A block later we meet up with Cathy. Lucy runs at her full speed, jumps into her arms and kisses her all over the face. “Hello.” I say to Cathy, how was your day.” She seemed pleased by my greeting and began to tell us about her day. Cathy smiles as Lucy continued to snuggle and grace her with a bunch of excited wet kisses. We were the perfect family. Finally, Cathy asked Lucy how her day was. Lucy responded with the typical fare…park, playing, lunch, dinner, naps and cartoons. Then she said, “Mommy I promise I will never have poop on my lip again.” Cathy looks startled by this odd promise.
“When did she have poopie on her lip?” She asked.
“Ohhh, a few minutes ago. Don’t ask me how or why, I don’t know. We’ve had quite a day but she told me she will never have it on her lip again. I sorta wiped it off and that was that.”
“I kissed her on the lips!” She seemed pretty upset by this. “Why didn’t you tell me, she had poop on her lip before I let her kiss me?”
“Well I was gonna, but I didn’t want to be rude. I wanted to find out about all the pleasantries of your day.”
I spent that night on the couch. Cathy is currently seeking revenge.

From Lucy's Lips II

“DAD! DADDY! Come here, I need you to look at this.” Lucy was on the back porch, she had been there for about 20 minutes. She has demonstrated on many occasions that she can sit back there and occupy herself for hours, so when she woke up from her nap that afternoon and decided she needed to draw and color; I left her to do just that. I was in no hurry really. She yells for me all the time, I didn’t sense any abnormal inflections or patterns of speech that would cause me to jump up from my comfy chair and race to the back porch. It will take a lot more than that to get me moving.

Again she yells, “Daddy! Daddy! Come here. I really need you to look at this.” I am going to get up eventually to see what she drew; I’ll just do it at my leisure. And then she yelled again. This time she added a few words. One in particular, confused me.

“Daddy! Come here I really really need you to look at this. I drew a HUGE erection.” There was a brief pause in which I peeked my head around the corner and squinted my eyes the way people do when they are unclear of something. My initial thought was… Did she just say she had drawn an “erection?” I must have gone over the order of that particular strain of words 100 times, in less than a second. She was standing in front of her easel with her hands on her hips and a smile on her face. I waited for her to clarify herself… “Daddy look! My erection is so beautiful.” Okay, that did the trick. I was out of my comfy seat and in a very concerned and confused state; I rushed to the back porch.

My heart is pounding as I turn to look at this “beautiful erection” she has so proudly displayed on her easel. I open my eyes. I’m staring at this blue thing, with a bunch of red and orange lines coming out of the top.

“Isn’t my volcano great? Look at the pretty erection it has.”
I breathe a sigh of relief and relax… “It’s an eruption Lu. The volcano is having an eruption.”
“Oh, okay… eruption. Isn’t it beautiful?”
After I wiped the sweat off my forehead, I looked down and said,“Well, it is now.”

From Lucy's Lips

So I decided my blog needed some consistency. Something easy I could write about, you know nothing huge, just something I didn't have to think about. The list of ideas for this weekly post soon became overwhelming. How was I gonna narrow down a list that included such topics as: Food, The Auto Industry, Movies that would have been much better if Steve Guttenburg were cast as the lead (Demolition Man, The Fast and The Furious and Pearl Harbor to name a few), How to lose weight blogging and The Benefits of Bubble Baths "A Man's Escape." Yup, these were all worthy ideas, but it wasn't until 6:30 this morning that I finally came to a decision.

Cathy was getting ready for work, I was still lounging in the bed holding onto my last precious moment of sleep when Lucy crawled up next to me. She patted me on the head, said good morning and followed it up with this brutally honest exchange:

"Umm daddy, I have to get off the bed... fast."
"Why?"
"My belly is hurting, really bad."
"From what?"
"Ummm daddy, I think your breath is making my belly feel bad. It kinda smells like tooters."
"I doubt it smells like tooters." Although, I didn't doubt it had a tang to it.
"Daddy I don't want any hugs, I wanna get down. Your breath is hurting my feelings and my belly. How about you just stay in bed by yourself?" So there I laid alone in bed for the next 5 minutes breathing into my hand and smelling the return. I still didn't think it smelled like "tooters," but I did get a little bit dizzy.

There it was, my new weekly column, staring right into my tooter-smelling breath. It was honest, frequent and it simple. More importantly it was unpredictable, 'cause one can never tell what words will be said when they fly From Lucy's Lips.