Amazing

The word "amazing" is somewhat overused these days. It's the adjective of choice for everything from diving catches in baseball to good tasting pie. But parenting really is an amazing thing.

According to the Internet, the definition of amazing is “a feeling of great surprise or wonder.” If that's not a succinct way to describe many parenting “firsts” I don’t know what is. Actually, feelings of great wonder become a regular thing for young parents. And I talk about all those wonderful moments a lot, so let’s talk about the other side of amazing. The dark side. Where parents feel great surprise, often immediately followed by a desperate need for antibacterial wipes.

Kids are amazingly messy. Sometimes it’s in the cute, I got spaghetti or cake all over the place way. Sometimes it’s in the I’m going to poop on you the second you take my diaper off way.

I saw John toddle into the hallway from the bathroom the other day holding a toy bus. The bus had water in it and he dumped the water on the floor and went back into the restroom. I walked over to see if there was a bucket of water in the bathtub. Nope. But John was scooping water out of the toilet using the bus as a makeshift pail. I was greatly surprised and immediately needed antibacterial wipes. Welcome to the dark side of amazement.

Sometimes there are casualties when you’re dealing with the dark side. In our case, those have mostly been sippy cups. For some reason, perhaps because the kids intentionally hide them, we seem to lose a sippy cup every month. There’s nothing amazing about that, especially if the missing cup contains water. But when it contains milk, it’s a thing of wonder. A thoroughly disgusting thing, but still.

How that small cup hidden under a seat in the minivan can become a biohazard-esque stench is a wonder to me. The fact that this has happened several times just adds to the wonder. And those cups are unsalvageable. We’ve washed, sanitized and even boiled them to get them to a usable state but they are tainted for life. It’s no use crying over spilled milk, or washing sippy cups with two week old, summer sun heated, curdled milk either. (Another wonder is how my wife has gone nose-deaf due to constant exposure to the pungent smell of the kids. These poison sippy cups are poking holes in the ozone and while she’s sitting next to them eating a bowl of cereal).

Sometimes the dark and light side of amazing coalesce, and you get to see something truly special. This occurrence was more wonder than surprise or disgust to me, but then again I didn’t have to clean it up. I got home from work and my wife said something amazing had happened. She said the two-year-old came out of the restroom asking for a wet wipe because there was an accident. She went in to inspect the scope of the accident, as there had been at least one accident that resulted in about a lake’s worth of pee on the floor. But she quickly discovered she was looking in the wrong direction.

There was a small trail from the toilet toward the door that went up the door. And it just kept going up. Somehow, this kid had not only missed the toilet, but shot a streak of urine over FIVE FEET HIGH onto the bathroom door! I saw the picture. It was amazing. (Perhaps some perspective would be helpful: He's three feet tall. This would be like a six-foot man peeing into a basketball goal.)

So next time someone describes a concert or a dessert or a World Cup goal as amazing, pause for a moment and compare it to one of these items of great surprise and wonder. I bet it won’t measure up.