This Little Piggy

THE FOLLOWING BLOG IS RATED PG-13. PARENTAL GUIDANCE IS SUGGESTED! YOU MAY ALSO WANT TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE NOT EATING ANYTHING WHEN YOU READ THIS ENTRY. IT COULD RUIN YOUR APPETITE!

Babies make a lot of cute sounds. They also make a lot of gross ones. And while I believe my daughter is the most precious creature on the face of the earth, sleeping with her in the cradle next to my side of the bed takes me back to my own childhood, when I would spend the night at my grandparents' house. One minute she's snoring loud enough to trigger the Clapper and turn the television on and off all night. That's what would happen when I slept with Grandma. You had no idea how Quincy came to his conclusions, because you could only catch every other scene.

If Penelope is not snoring, she's passing gas with every toss and turn, like a symphony of angry car horns. That's what spending the night with Grandpa was like. Roll over, here comes a Volkswagen. Turning again, watch out for that tractor trailer! For your information, my grandparents slept in separate rooms, probably because one of them snored like a chainsaw and the other one farted like an accordion.

The sounds of nature don't end when she's asleep. This little girl gets the hiccups at least four times a day. It's as if we're living with Dudley Moore's drunken character from "Arthur." We should put a top hat on her, hand her a champagne flute, and draw her a bubble bath. I'm waiting for Liza Minnelli to walk in at any minute and Christopher Cross to start singing "If you get caught between the moon and New York City..."

She does have cute little burps, though. That's actually one of my favorite times, when one of us has her sitting up on our lap, her head in one hand, beating her back like a drum with the other. That's when her head is on a swivel, and she starts checking out her surroundings. She's very quick to let out a little burp. When she's not burping or hiccuping, she's snorting. Like a geek laughing at a joke. I know there's a little personality in there, trying to come out. But for now, we have to settle for Wilbur from "Charlotte's Web."

Then comes time to change her dirty diaper, which mostly is a quick exercise. Except, of course for that one episode when she reared back like a drag racer and let out a squirt of projectile poop that sailed clear across the room and landed on the glider chair. Good thing we got those slip covers! I felt like we were in a food fight and she was armed with Hershey's Syrup.

Grossed out yet? Because it's going to get worse. I hope you're not one of those prudes who cringes at the word 'vagina.' If you are, get over it, or stop reading. I refuse to use a made-up word to refer to my daughter's vagina. That's what it is. And that's what the rest of this story is going to be about:

Here's a sentence I never thought would come out of my mouth, which I now say with stunning regularity: "Get your foot out of your vagina." It's amazing how often, at least twice every time I'm changing her, Penelope does in fact stick her foot into her vagina. She's quite the contortionist. Actually, I would like a show of hands from the ladies out there. How many of you can actually put the heel of your foot into your vagina? Take time to think about it before answering. That's pretty impressive if you can. Never did I think I would be routinely cleaning poop off of my daughter's foot. Between her performing her little gymnastics routine, my wife's breasts constantly hanging out, and my dog licking herself in the corner, it's like I'm living in some bizarre porno world.

This one time when I was changing her, I had taken off all of her clothes. That's something we do not as a preemptive measure against any volcanic mishaps, but to wake her up to subsequently feed her. So she's lying there on the changing table, in all of her freedom and glory. Exercising her constitutional rights. Uninhibited. Unencumbered. She has grown accustomed to being naked. It used to make her scream. Now she lies there with a look on her face as if to say, "Now this is a party!"

Then out of the blue I noticed something. Penelope was giving me her "I'm ready to puke" face. It looks like she's trying to get a piece of hair off of her tongue. So I sit her up to burp her, and she proceeds to spit up. It resembled a spilled bottle of white-out pouring out of her mouth. It rolled down her chest, made a circle around her belly button, and landed, yes, in her vagina! GOAL!

So I had to clean her again, but not before the inspector came in. "What happened?," my wife asked. "She spit up, in her vagina, " I replied. That's fun to say too! Mostly any sentence with the word 'vagina' in it will make me giggle a little. Even that one did.

After we got her washed up once again, we laid her down to dress her. She's wiggling around. Happy. Grunting. Farting. An old man trapped in a baby girl's body. She looks very pleased and proud of herself when she lets out a fart. Aren't we all?

That's when it happened. Right after one of her little gastric releases, she then straightened out like a diver getting into position, pulled her legs to her chest, and bubbled over like a clogged sink. I didn't know if I should stick my hand in there to stop it, or get something to catch it. Instead, I literally went with the flow. The pee stream traveled down both legs and onto the changing pad.

There were sounds and substances coming from every orifice on this child's body! She was a crazy malfunctioning Betsy Wetsy doll!

It didn't end there, we picked up her legs to wipe underneath and saw she had left a little dollop of mustard on the pad. Yellow crap on green cloth. Any more and she would have made blue. Our little artist working her pallet. And we were hysterical. Doubled over in laughter. Lying on the bed, kicking and screaming, gasping for air. It was like a Keystone Cops routine

Even when she is at her most gross, she is at her most innocent and her most real. And we are loving every minute of it.