diarrhea

• Stomach cramps
• Loud bubbling noises emanating from my mid-section
• 300 trips to the toilet
• Prayers to the heavens to make it stop
• Adobe mud huts
• Ring of fire

37 weeks

My feet have never looked so teeny tiny. My midsection...Never so ENORMOUS. Thirty seven weeks have flown by and I'm knee deep in 22 trips to the toilet per night, itchy belly skin, nightmares of my water breaking in inopportune locales and people constantly asking me, "Haven't you had that baby yet?" That last one has to be my favorite as clearly I am barely sporting a bump.

toilet shoe

See that little piece of floor, right there between the grimey bowl and the steel divider thingy? That's where my flipper became wedged in the Target bathroom the other day.

How in the world could that happen? I don't know about you, but I can't remember the last time I used my hand to flush a public toilet. Besides, it's a public metal. I'm not touching that.

So that is how I found myself, shoeless, struggling to unwedge my flipper out from under that public cesspool of germitude, slightly nauseous, balancing on my one stumpy leg, while trying to touch as little as possible.

Thankfully I was successful in my rescue of my foot gear. And yes, I did put it in the washer when I arrived home.

toilet terrorist

It goes without saying that cleaning the toilet's the worst. There are few things that beat its germ-ridden disgustingness. But it's that much more horrifying when a urine bandit lives amongst you. You know this villain, it's the mysterious anti-hero who's super powers include getting urine ALL OVER the toilet. Everywhere.

Like up on the rim under the seat itself. On the underside of the seat. On that back part where the seat screws into the bowl. Down the sides of the bowl where the toilet connects to the floor. Even, miraculously, horrifyingly on the f'ing wall next to the toilet.

I used to think my husband was the pee bandit. Now I'm not so sure. Granted, he's got the equipment that would best lend itself to the bandit's trademark leavings.... But now that we're living with a larger number of toilets at our disposable, I'm thinking Superdoodle's the culprit. Her bathroom terrorism has been known to reach epic proportions.

At times she can even get poop on the toilet's rim. Yes. Poop. I don't know how she does it. Just that she does, and it freaks me out. Her butt's so little and that opening is so open. It's come to the point that I've had to hold toilet lectures a la my father circa 1986, complete with wiping re-training and apparatus mount and dismount techniques.

So far, it's not working.