When your life becomes a party story, you know you have a problem.
I realized that I hit rock bottom of parenthood craziness when I walked into a room at an event and someone who knows about my ridiculous life ran over and ushered me over to a group of strangers, introduced me and said, “tell your poop story!”
Ummmm. Crap. Yes, of course I have a poop story. Doesn’t everyone?
Apparently not.
Apparently I’m one of the lucky chosen ones with the stories that people drop their jaw at and gather around at a party, and that was just a Tuesday for me.
You see, I have twin toddlers and parenting twins is not a boring job. Like any parent would agree, raising children consists of a series of phases. My two-year-old twins had a phase when they were having a hard time keeping their clothes on. They would wake up in the morning or wake up from a nap and immediately rip off everything they had on. This included their diaper. I had heard about kids doing this before, but my older boys never engaged in such an activity, so I didn’t think much about it. Friends suggested putting their onsies on backwards and put footless pajamas on backwards so the zipper was in the back. Sure that would work if there wasn’t a second culprit available to unzip said backwards pajamas and work in cahoots to toss all clothing aside. I tried it all and nothing worked. They were pajama and diaper free every morning.
After my mom babysat one day she suggested duct taping their diapers on. I thought she was nuts. I mean, who does that? Certainly not me. Then I walked into their room one fine morning to get them dressed for the day and they had taken it one step further and all of the stuff that is inside of the diaper was spread all over the entire floor in their room.
If you have not had the pleasure of experiencing first hand what is inside of a diaper, let me give you a glimpse. It is made up of thousands of little beads of gel. I had seen the inner workings before when I had accidently put a diaper in the washing machine with a load of laundry and it exploded all over everything. It was a total mess. But this time, those little beads of gel were soaked with urine and were all over the white carpet in my twin’s bedroom. Totally gross.
And then just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the unthinkable happened…I walked into a real live $hit show. It was 7am on a Saturday morning and I walked into a room that was covered in poop Picasso paintings all over the wall and windows. Similar to finger paint art, without the non-toxic finger-paint part. It was horrifying.
So, I rethought my reaction to my mother’s suggestion and started duct taping their diapers.
And it worked like a dream. Those diapers stayed put. Who knew that duct tape could be a parenting game changer?
So, of course I quickly became a duct tape junkie.
That jumbo sized roll of tape gave me other quick solutions I needed to tackle everyday obstacles.
When my twins started flipping their mattresses and turning them into slides for a make-shift bedroom playground every morning, I duct taped the mattress to the toddler bed.
When my daughter figured out how to operate the child lock on their bedroom door, I duct taped the button into the locked position.
And when they started climbing their built-in shelving unit in their room and jumping into each others arms from the top shelf resulting in bloody faces, I duct taped a cardboard slab to cover the shelves.
I didn’t intend on being a duct tape fanatic. I just find myself in constant need of quick solutions to logistical problems everyday. Sometimes there isn’t time to think through the “best” way to do it. Sometimes I need an immediate fix so I don’t feel like I’m loosing in this game of parenthood.
I mean, as the saying goes, ”If you can’t duct it…” You know the rest.
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