We just returned from a 3-day (really 2 1/2 days) car trip to visit my parents. That's 6 days round trip. With a toddler. And we all survived, trauma-free. How did we do it, you ask?
Chapstick.
I've noticed for months that Clara has a fascination with chapstick. She'll happily walk around the house, chapstick clenched in her chubby fist, liberally applying it to her mouth area for 10 minutes at a stretch.
So Sunday afternoon when she began to get fussy in the car, what did I slip back to her to get her quiet? You got it--chapstick. And now I know that she'll happily smear the stuff all over her face for hours at a stretch if permitted. At each rest stop, we'd scrape pink wax off her face so she'd be somewhat presentable. By three o'clock, the tube was empty (this was after a nap or two, clutching the chapstick all the while). I'm quite sure that towards the end she was digging it out with her dragon-lady fingernails (yeah, we forgot the fingernail clippers at home . . . bad call). Still, it was a small price to pay for a few hours of peace, right?
Despite the enormous balls of wax that we shaved off her face, I feared that we may have come up a bit short on accounting for all the chapstick that disappeared in those hours. She didn't possibly eat it, did she? Not being the kind of parent that freaks out over much of anything, I just figured that if some was ingested, it's made of wax, which IS edible in small quantities. I hoped that the worst it would do to her would speed things up along her digestive track. And as she's more often constipated than not, didn't figure that would be a bad thing.
Fast forward a few hours and we've stopped for the night in Texarkana, making a pit stop at the Waffle House before checking into a hotel. As I finish my waffle, I notice that a horrible, horrible smell is radiating from the direction of Clara. However, as I had left the diaper bag out in the car, my jacket in the car, and it was freezing cold in between the Waffle House and the car, I decided that we could wait twenty minutes to change her once we checked into the hotel.
As I took Clara out of the car at the hotel, I noticed a brown lump the size of a quarter on the label of her carseat. Oh no. This is not good. Gingerly, I held her well under her butt and high on her back, so as not to get any poop on me. Mario, who freaks out about most bodily functions, promptly declared her to be poopy ALL OVER!
Thank you, Mario. I hadn't realized.
Actually, he was right and I hadn't realized how very bad it was. After all, she had been wearing her very long winter jacket over her clothes in the carseat, so if poop managed to get on the carseat . . . yeah, there really was poop ALL OVER. So while Mario checked in, Clara and I bolted for the nearest restroom, and I did my best to clean her up without making the bathroom appear that the toilet exploded. Thank goodness I did have the foresight to pack an extra set of clothes in the diaper bag. After using roughly 10 wet wipes, all traces of poo were cleaned up--even off the winter jacket! The clothes had to be washed in a sink in the room and then quarantined to a plastic bag for the remainder of the trip.
So will I be using chapstick to entertain the child on long car rides in the future? I just don't know. Was the exploding poo related to the chapstick or had a completely different cause?
Perhaps we'll try it on another road trip to test this theory.
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