Quin Quickies

The Circumcision

This weekend, my brother-in-law turned 50 and we were invited to his party. On the 30 minute drive to his house, Jenny and I were behaving like the good parents that we are and allowing the kids to listen to the Comedy Central channel on Sirius Satellite Radio, something of which we are currently enjoying a free trial. The content on the station isn’t all that, well, appropriate, but we count on the kids not listening much like they don’t listen to us - ever.

At one point during the programming, they broke away from the usual stand-up comedian routine and inserted a funny song. This particular song was a parody to Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls.” It was titled “God Hates the Tips of Little Baby’s Dicks,” a song about circumcision, obviously. Of course, Quinton and Ethan were listening, and Quin reacted to the rest of our cackles at the lyrics of this very funny song. Ethan was a little embarrassed, but Jenny asked him if he remembered when Quinton was circumcised, something we were unfortunate enough to walk in on during the early days of his life - something that Ethan wasn’t on board with at the time to be sure! Quinton heard this conversation and asked what we were talking about and we told him we were talking about when he got circumcised as a baby. He asked, somewhat aptly, “I got Super Sized?” I’m sure there’s a racial stereotype that makes that funny, but I probably shouldn’t write about it.

Poop

Being that I have the sense of humor and maturity level of your average 6 year old, there are few things in the world that I find more hilarious than jokes and stories about pooping or farting. This story changed that a little for me, and I died a little bit inside when I realized it.

Jenny was away on business as she does maybe once or twice a year, leaving the boys and I to fend for ourselves for a few days. It was mid-June and we were trying to get some landscaping and yard work done before we were hosting a party later in the summer, so I elected to take the day off on this particular Thursday to get some things done before needing to deal with the kids’ schedules. This was the day that Jenny was scheduled to be home, so we were all excited and relieved.

The beginning of the day was easy enough - rides to summer school with lunches in tow, pick Ethan up around noon, then go get Quin at 4:00, get him changed, fed, and ready for baseball at 6:30. After picking Quin up, I quickly fed him and sat him in front of the television to unwind from the day by 5:15. I figured I had just enough time to complete digging the 14 inch deep hole I had been excavating in the back yard where our patio would eventually live. I figured I needed to be in the house by 5:50 in order to get Quin changed and ready in time to get to baseball by 6:20 or so. By the time I finished digging the hole it was 5:40 - I was 10 minutes early! What on earth would I do with all of this extra time? I was about to find out…

I went inside to clean up and asked Quin to go upstairs and change into his baseball uniform which I had laid out earlier that day. He immediately complied, which should have had me wondering, but I was already riding the high of having extra time that I didn’t think anything of it. After washing up and changing my clothes, I went upstairs to see how Quin was doing getting into his uniform. I found him naked in the bathroom where he handed me his underwear and said, “here dad, you better take care of this.” The underwear were completely covered in crap. It was so much that my brain couldn’t really process it adequately, but what I figured was that he went to the bathroom at school and forgot to wipe, something he’s famous for doing. So I asked him, “did you forget to wipe at school today?” “Yes,” he said plainly. OK, no problem, I sent him into his room to get dressed and I took the underwear to the toilet as my mother had taught me to do when we were dealing with the cloth diapers of my younger siblings and I rinsed them out and left them to dry in the bathtub.

After having dealt with that, I went into Quin’s room, and he was standing behind his bed, something he typically doesn’t do. That got me to wondering, but still didn’t think much of it. “What are you doing back there?” I asked him. “Getting dressed,” he told me. That was when I observed the state of the room and found the brown colored footprints leading all the way through his room, around the bed to where he was sitting. Finally aware of the full breadth of the situation, I asked him to walk around the bed where I noticed that his entire leg and backside were covered in human fecal material. Well, I guess I knew what I was going to do with my “extra” 10 minutes!

“Aw man, did you have an accident?”

“Yes.”

“Are you feeling sick? Did you have diarrhea?”

“What’s diarrhea?”

“When your poop is all runny.”

“No, it was a big log!”

In the end, it didn’t turn out to be too big a deal. I cleaned the footprints to eliminate the evidence and we found a pair of black sweatpants to replace the ruined white baseball pants that he was intending to wear, and we still made it to baseball on time…

I was REALLY happy for Jenny to come home that night!!!