It occurred to me recently that not only am I a blogger, I am a bogger, which is the technical term for someone who has changed too many nappies in their time. By my calculations, I have dealt with around 5334 nappies over the past five years – at least 25% of which have involved:

1. the greeny-black meconium of newborns (stringy!)
2. the cottage cheese-like formations of breastfed bubs (lumpy!)
3. the bulging brown stools of solid-stuffing toddlers (weighty!)
4. the tummy-and-back-smearing of Two-Year-Old-Turds (OMG!)

And frankly, friends, I’ve had my fill.

But the cosmos is a kidder, and recently my daily engagement with excrement took a turn for the worse… let’s just say I’ve discovered how hard it is to remove faeces from the fine fur of stuffed toys:

What did Bluey ever do to deserve this?

Obviously I’ve somehow failed to communicate to my children the basics of respect in relationships. Rule Number One: Never ever defecate on a loved one’s head.

Before I had kids, if you’d told me there were children on earth who would experiment with the concept of Poo as Paint, I would have called you a liar. And I would have been damned sure of one thing: my children would never do that.

Well, welcome to Adjust Your Expectations 101.  It’s a theme I dwell on in my novel, The Mothers’ Group. For better or for worse, as mothers we have to learn to deal with copious quantities of sh%*t - real, metaphorical or even imagined – or life becomes a bit of a tough slog.

So at times like this, when I’m up to my armpits in Napisan and nailbrushes, a bit of perspective goes a long way… I take a deep breath, count backwards from ten, and remind myself that no one is doing it tougher than Bluey.

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