Kelly Seeks

Okay, so I didn’t actually write the following account.  My husband did, after getting off the phone with me on  a particularly chaotic call.  The back story is that he was deployed to Afghanistan, and I was holding the fort with our two little boys.  Every day brought new adventures, and the following is one that will always go down in our family history.  Told from my husband’s perspective, I bring you…”Dirty Water.”

I was told a story about my kids today that I needed to capture, the
date was October 21, 2012 and it happened at our home in Hawaii.  I have
two kids, one is four and the other is two years old and there never
seems to be a dull moment in the house.  My oldest son, was
diagnosed with autism about a year ago and because of his condition
there seems to be a lot of unusual events that occur in any given day
which my wife is held to deal with.  My other son R, who is
two and was also diagnosed with autism just a few months ago also
keeps the household on its toes because of his actions.  Well here is
the day my oldest had one of the best one liners I have heard and I
think it will stick and be forever know as the “Dirty Water” story
in our household.
My wife was on the phone one afternoon with her mother who lives in Sun
City West in Arizona, having a normal conversation as they do on a
weekly basis.  She looked over and saw our son B holding something in his
hand and thought she should go and check it out.  Once closer to him
she realized what it was; it turns out that B had an accident and
was holding his poop in his hand in an attempt to take care of it.
Once she realized what it was she had, I won’t say an over reaction
because there is no telling what any parent would really do in that
situation, so I will call it an intense reaction, a reaction that was
intense enough to startle B who in turn dropped the poop onto the
floor!  Well as anyone who is a parent and deals with messes like
this, realizing that the poop is now in a heavy traffic area and there
are two kids who potentially step in the mess and track it all over
the house, knows that this was a problem that needed to be dealt with
very quickly.  So, in a stern voice she says to B, “get in the
bathroom!”   Now there was a kid in the bathroom with a poopy hand and
dirty pants that was tracking some of the poop behind him into the
bathroom.  There is a piece of poop on the floor and the paper towels
are in the kitchen.  There is a two year old kid that is now alert to
the event and is walking around in an excited manner.  Now she has a
bit of a dilemma, either go into the bathroom and start on B knowing
that the two year old would be in the same room with a pile of poop on
the floor or go to the kitchen and grab the paper towels to start the
clean up in the living room.  Either answer has a kid that is
unsupervised in a room with poop…and no matter what the answer is the
parent will choose wrong in this situation 90% of the time.  Well,
she chooses to go to the kitchen and get the paper towels to start
the clean up in the living room, and as you could guess she chose the
wrong course of action.  R, our youngest, immediately after she ran to get the
paper towels ran over to the poop were he stepped into it and was
running around the house!  Okay, now we have three problems, the poop
in the living room, the poop in the bathroom with B and R running
all over with poop on this feet, and it is again time for the parent
to prioritize and make a decision as to what to action on next.  Of
course any parent would understand that having a kid running around
takes priority, however once that decision is made, your kids will
find a way to prove you wrong, and this situation is no different.
She catches R and begins to clean his feet and immediately moves
to the living room to clean up the remainder of the poop and she
brings it to the toilet.  She finds B in the bathroom, frantically
attempting to clean up his mess and is doing a good job putting his
poop into the toilet and flushing the toilet, however there has to be
more that  goes wrong if the kids are to be on par with previous
actions to this point and they did not disappoint!
Everything happened in a matter of seconds from her throwing the poop
from the living room into the toilet, where she went to check on R
and get him ready for a bath when she heard water in the bathroom, and
it wasn’t the sink, water was hitting the floor!  She ran back over
to the bathroom and saw B still flushing the toilet, standing in a
pool of water from the toilet, he looks at her and says, “It’s dirty
water.”  She agreed and began to start that clean up.  At this point
the conversation she was having with her mother was over since there
was a definite need for her attention in the home, R was still
dirty and now in the bathroom standing in the dirty water, and B was
taking the towel down off the rack and trying to clean up the water
off the floor.  I am very proud of B for attempting to clear the
water off the floor however he missed the concept that since the water
was cleaned with the towel the towel is now considered dirty so of
course he put it back on the towel rack when he was finish.  She
raced both kids to the upstairs bathroom and threw them in the tub!
The crisis was now over and she could take a breath for the first
time since all of this began!
I just think that is a great story and wanted to share it with you, I
am very proud of my family and think that she is doing a great job
handling an impossible situation and making great progress each day
with the kids!