Code Brown

For those of you lucky enough to not know what "Code Brown" means, let me clarify - it's when your kid poops in a place other than his diaper or a potty. In Ben's case, it mostly means it's happened in the bathtub. We used to get Code Browns pretty frequently when Ben was around 12 months old; conveniently for me, a lot of them happened in my last month of pregnancy when Steve was gallavanting around southern New Hampshire, so I got to clean Ben, the poop, the toys, and the tub all while having Braxton-Hicks contractions. Lovely.

After months of a Code Brown-free Ben, we thought we were out of the woods. We had one 2 weeks ago, though. It was an unusual Code Brown in that it happened after Ben had been bathed. Steve was getting Logan into PJ's and Ben was running around naked - which is the cutest thing ever, really - and I was doing something extraordinarily useful that I can't recall right now. I remember going to collect Ben from Logan's doorway when my eye caught something odd on the floor. "What's that brown toy on the floor? I've never seen that one before...?" Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of Ben's poop-grunt and saw his arms flapping the way they do when he's pooping, and another "brown toy" fell to the floor. Ick. At least we have wood floors. I shudder to think what people with wall-to-wall carpet would do in these situations.

I thought that Code Brown was a fluke. But tonight it happened again - in the tub. The thing that's such a pain about having a Code Brown in the tub is that you immediately have to get the kid out, because if they inadvertently take a sip of the poop-tainted water they could get pretty sick. So the first step is to rinse the kid off as quickly as possible with fresh water, get the kid out of the tub, wash each and every toy that was in the tub at the time of the Code, and wash the entire tub. Oh, and at some point you have to reach in, get the piece(s) of poop, and flush them down the toilet. Usually I let the tainted water drain so the poop is easy to grab with toilet paper.

Code Brown - definitely one of the most unpleasant things about parenting.