A Poop Post, Featuring Tori Spelling

Warning: this post may contain content that some readers find objectionable. Namely, readers without children or those who are especially sensitive to descriptions of certain bodily functions. (Translation: this is a post about poop.)

Last week I read Tori Spelling’s memoir, Mommywood. A quick, fun read, my reaction was equal parts “Thank God I’m not famous and don’t have to deal with THAT” and “Wow, celebrities ARE just like the rest of us.” Case in point: they have to deal with their babies' poop.

Oh, Tori may take her tot to private swim lessons in salt-water swimming pools, but when the sh*t hits the swim diaper, she’s left holding the diaper bag. I laughed out loud at her description of how poop loses its “structural integrity” underwater, and how she debated whether to throw away a poopy towel and risk being seen as a wasteful, spoiled brat or whether to stuff the mess in her bag and bring it home.

In a related story, my parents were visiting last weekend and generously agreed to babysit -- and bathe –- the boys one night. All was well until the poop hit the tub. Miles screamed, my parents panicked, and the baby was oblivious. To capture the true horror of the experience, here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote when Miles was small, “Month 16: Tub Torpedo.” Add in another kid and it’s even worse.

“There’s no way around it: being a mom means dealing with gross stuff. I knew this going into it. And I’m not a gal who likes gross. From the moment I got pregnant I was bombarded with icky words like mucous and discharge and placenta. And the birth itself? Just yuck, people. Y-U-C-K.

And newborns, as everyone knows, do little more than pee and poop and spit up. Gross, but not that big a deal. Yet in spite of all my exposure to extreme grossness in the past year, I encountered a new level of nastiness the other night: the dreaded tub poop.

Now, I have been warned of this phenomenon by other moms. It’s even happened to C., who usually gives Miles his baths. I’m actually shocked that I’ve avoided it this long.

But no, that fateful evening, the baby stopped splashing, stood up, gave a telltale grunt and … the rest is just too gory to go into. But why stop now? You know what they say about, um, "stuff" hitting the fan? Well it’s worse when it hits the water. It immediately starts to dissolve and scatter in every direction. I swooped Miles out of that tub like I was rescuing him from the Titanic. Mayhem ensued. Gags were stifled. Powerful disinfectants were administered after the offending party was put to bed.

So now baths are back to being solely Dad’s domain. Isn’t it bad enough I went through childbirth? I can’t deal with this kind of carnage.”

I don’t want to spoil the book for you, but there’s another part where Tori describes scooping up a “dead leaf” floating near her toddler son in a hotel pool. Suffice it to say, mayhem ensued.