Chrystal Hurst
Parenting

It’s What A Mom Must Do: Poop Clean Up!

I met Chrystal a year ago.  Her father, Tony Evans, was the speaker at our Family First Dinner and Awards.  Her sister, Priscilla Shirer, was also there to receive the iMOM award and her brother Anthony Evans sang.  Amazing family! That night each of them had a memorable take-away for me, but it was Chrystal that I was most drawn to.  For some reason God opened a door in the over-scheduled evening for a few moments to really talk.  A few moments is all you need because Chrystal is real, warm and one of those moms that I know, without a doubt, would be a sweet friend if she lived in Tampa.

Like me, Chrystal is a mom of 5 and was happily living the anonymous mommy life when she was led to write, Kingdom Womanwith her dad. We have traded several messages about that craziness–writing, working and kids! I started the book this morning and she had me from the first line. I expected no less we are kindred moms for sure.

Here is a taste of this real woman, a real mom, dealing with a very real toddler problem–poop!

By Chrystal Evans Hurst

When my middle son, Kanaan was two years old, he went through various stages of, shall we say, “trying things”.

One of the most irritating of those things was his habit of taking off his diaper when we put him to bed. When he first started doing this, we’d go up and check on him right before we retired and find him sitting in the bed, all smiles, with his thumb in his mouth, looking at us like, “I knew you’d come eventually!” We would put on a fresh diaper, change his sheets if necessary, and then put him back in the bed.

After a few weeks of this, we wised up. We started putting him in pajama pants all-in-one pj’s that made it not-so-easy for him to accomplish his devilish feat.

That pretty much had solved the problem.

But one night, my husband Jessie, put the boys down for bed. My husband traveled quite a bit at that time and when he came home he would admittedly have to slowly but surely get back into our home routines. That night, he forgot the routine of our precautionary measures for locking Kanaan into his diaper.

After the boys had been in bed for a while, we realized that we still heard noise coming from upstairs and we needed to give them a “final” good night. As we headed to do so, we heard our oldest son Tre’ shout at the top of his lungs.  Mommy!, Kanaan boo-booed!

No worries.  It happens right?

Except this time, we realized there was an urgency in my four year old’s voice.  “MOMMY! COME QUICK! KANAAN BOO-BOOED!

We entered the room. And the smell that greeted me at the door was enough to make me want to run for my life.

Ladies, we are talking yuck everywhere – on the sheets, on the blanket, on feet, and in the carpet…SMUDGED into the carpet.

So while many other mothers slept peacefully in their beds that night, guess what I was doing. Cleaning up poop.

We didn’t have any carpet cleaner so I had to get out my natural cleaning book and look for how in the world to clean carpet with the stuff I had around the house. I’d been on this whole no chemicals thing, but let me tell you, I wished I had some chemicals that night…some strong ones.

For about 40-50 minutes around midnight, I was on my hands and knees cleaning and scrubbing. I’ll spare you the gory details. All of my efforts occurred at the same time that my boys were having the time of their lives because, to them, they were simply getting a late-night bath, followed by free, uninhibited, unexpected, bonus time to play with their toys.

Believe it or not, the carpet today looks like nothing ever happened that night. Between my natural concoctions that night and a borrowed steam cleaner the next day, I managed to figure out how to handle the situation.

And today, I stand tall and proud as I recollect that incident.  I’m willing to declare to the world that on that night, in my house, I conquered the poop!

But there is also a lesson I learned in this middle of this messy situation…

When I first went up my boys’ room, I had no idea how I was going to handle that mess. There is no class that I took at college (Go Aggies!) that trained me how to handle this kind of mess. IRS audit, yes…legal business disputes, yes…throwing together a presentation at the last minute, yes… cleaning up poop…totally unprepared. I had to figure it out in the moment. 

And much of motherhood is like that.  You figure it out as you go.  You read reference books as the need arises. You pray more as you need to. You make do, roll with the punches, and give it your best. 

You have to persevere and overcome.  Why?  Because there’s no other way out!

Can I tell you that night I wanted to shut the door, ignore the problem and then completely rip out the carpet in the light of day?  But that wasn’t an option… and many times in the midst of motherhood, bailing out and running away won’t fly. We do the best we can with what we have.  We make do. We roll with the punches, and we give our all.

We find a way to do what seems inconceivable, impossible, and insurmountable.

We overcome.

Why?  Because we are moms.  And conquering difficult situations is what we do!

What difficult situations have you conquered in your own journey of motherhood?  What hard stuff are you working to overcome right now?  I look forward to reading your thoughts and learning about your journey as you comment.

Chrystal Hurst is co-author of the recent release, Kingdom Woman and also blogs regularly at Chrystal’s Chronicles chrystalevanshurst.com/blog.

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