Until I became a parent I do not remember thinking about poop at all, ever. I pooped, and I didn’t mention it, UNTIL NOW, and life went on.

Oh god, now you all know.

Anyway! People joke about poop taking over your life when you become a parent. It’s always been framed like “you are now obsessed with tiny person A and tiny person A makes poop and the home care nurses tell you to monitor the poop and also you need to feel some control over your life so you monitor a daily life function, good for you!” but really it’s just that you have to put your face very close to excrement on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis when you have a baby. Repetition leads to normalcy. Then there’s teaching the small person to use a toilet–don’t get me started or I’ll weep–and wipe properly. Years go by and you start to see poop EVERYWHERE.

Not a day goes by when I don’t consider poop in some way. The other day @jenarbo posted a picture to twitter and it was of cigarette butts and I saw poop in the picture. She was all, “um it’s a leaf” and I was all, “whatever, I’m a hammer and the world looks like a nail, I mean poop.” And then she was all, “#unfollow.” Not really. I hope.

It’s not just the kids. There are many days when I don’t think about *their* poop, but then the cat poops on the carpet, with his accompanying POOP ALERT YOWL. There are also days when I don’t think about the kids’ poop and the cat poops in his box but when I go outside there is dog poop on the sidewalk. On the sidewalk!

(There are also days when all of that happens. We call those “Mommy’s Special Gin Days.” No, we don’t. OK, maybe.)

This is what prompts my post today. The last straw of poop, as it were. Dog poop on the sidewalk. It seems like an especial travesty, like an insult duct-taped to injury. How does a dog poop on a sidewalk and get away with it? (Answer: SMARTPHONES) On our walk to school we often have to step around three or four piles. My internal dialogue goes: “It’s bad enough that I have to think about the poop of two children and a cat but to have to step around your dog’s giant poop ON THE SIDEWALK because he couldn’t he even go on the grass, how does that even HAPPEN? makes me absolutely ready to declare a war on poop. An entire war.”

No idea what a war on poop would look like. After all, it’s a natural function of healthy animals. We poop. There are books about it. Oh so many books. We adults and semi-adults put our poop in the poop recepticle and we move on. You can’t battle or war against it. But I can rage, I guess. I can rage against the improper placement of poop.

I need it to be spring. And I need the dogs–dogs, I love you! Don’t ever change, except please don’t poop on the sidewalk! Wouldn’t the grass be nicer, softer?–to poop in the GRASS and then I need their minders to pick it up with their baggies and dispose of it appropriately. I need this.

I have just discovered that poop is NOT one of those words where the more you type it the weirder it looks. The more you type “poop” the more you end up thinking about poop.* Poop.

Sorry.

* I blogged about my children for 6 years and didn’t write about poop once. Now it’s all out of my system, I won’t do it again.

(Poop.)