The Poo

She woke me up at 12:50 the first time. The dog, that is. I had stayed up a little later than normal watching a TV show and it felt like I had just dropped into sleep. She was whining loudly enough for me to hear her over the wondrous white noise app I installed on my iPhone that keeps me blissfully unaware of all but the loudest of sounds from my children and pets. They have to really want me to wake me up.

Apparently, the dog really wanted me.

I accepted that there must be a problem out of the ordinary because she usually sleeps through the night. Once I stumbled through the kitchen and found the leash from the strange place my son had dropped it, I opened her crate and took her outside so she could sit and look at me pleadingly.

Two nights ago, after she'd been in her outdoor lot for all but two hours, she woke me up at three wanting outside. I let her out and watched her sprint into the distance. I gave her a few minutes to go to the bathroom and then whistled her back. She came with alacrity, charging full speed towards me in the door. To say I was surprised gives a new definition to understatement. It normally takes several calls before she decides to hear me calling, so I was pleased to be able to get back in bed so quickly.

Of course, she was only teasing. At the last possible second, she altered her trajectory so that she whizzed by me at a speed high enough for my nightgown to ripple. At the very edge of the porch light, she screeched to a halt and gave me a mischievous doggy grin before heading into the pitch blackness of the front yard.

I whistled and yelled again, and then I heard the charge of claws coming my way. I prepared to grab her collar this trip by, but with puppy laughter, she raced by at the perfect distance for me to just feel the fur of her back. Damn dog. We kept this "game" up for at least fifteen minutes until I caved and got the treats. Right in the door she came when I shook the bag, and I got another three hours of sleep once my temper chilled.

Hence the leash last night. I was not playing rocket dog another night. If she had to go, she could go while on the leash. It was her retractable leash, so she'd even be able to burn a little energy jerking my shoulder socket.

But no. She just sat beside me and gave me a pitiful look.

"Go pee," I told her. I got a lick on the hand and whine in response.

I moved a few more feet out into the wet grass. "Pee!" I commanded forcefully. She took a few steps out, turned around, sat at my feet, and hit me with another pitiful look.

The other dogs came up. The happy-to-see-you-here nose sniffing and licking commenced, and when I told her to go pee a third time, the two outdoor dogs looked at her as though waiting for her to get on with her business so they could go back to bed too. She hid behind my legs and wouldn't budge.

At this point, it was on o'clock in the morning and I was tired, so I took her inside and she willingly went back to her bed and laid down. I shut the door and breathed deeply when my head hit the pillow.

Ten minutes later, she whined again.

My response was a bellowed, "SHUT UP!" and she did.

Fifteen minutes later, I hear a whine followed by my daughter's dulcet call: "Mama, I think Vivie had an accident."

Grumbling and thinking havoc and mayhem, I took the four steps from my bed to the door when it hit me.

Up to that point, the worst smell ever was caused by my husband's digestive system really not liking the barium cocktail required before his CT scan and resulted in my husband and I riding with our heads hanging out the window during a sleet storm in below freezing weather while driving to a friend's house.

The smell assaulting my hallway was at least that bad. With an oath, I flipped on my daughter's light and saw the dog, head hung low and a miserable expression on her face, sitting on the top corner of her doggy bed, as far from the string of diarrhea as she could get.

With a more serious oath, I opened her cage and she made good time tracking the diarrhea down my hall in little, wet, brownish paw prints. That's when I really started cursing. The first time anyway.

I let her outside and decided that I didn't care if she ever came back in. Since I was in the kitchen anyway, I opened the cabinet under the sink to get out my cleaner. My Mr. Clean wasn't there.

My housekeeper usually brings her own supplies, but I figured it was possible that she had moved mine somewhere else. I looked next underneath the bathroom sink. Nothing. Not even extra shampoo. I was more than a little pissed off now, both at the dog and at the housekeeper, since I know that I had a bottle of some sort of cleaning solution somewhere, but furious at 1 a.m. is still stupid tired at 1 a.m.. I headed into the basement where I might find anything. She doesn't normally go down there, but occasionally she leaves a note about doing some laundry so I thought it possible that she might have left my cleaner there. It wasn't.

I finally found a little bottle of an old cleaner supplement that smelled strongly if not good, and decided it was the best I had. Then I turned to look for my mop bucket. I still haven't found it.

I went upstairs, grumbling to myself, grabbed the mop, and ran a bathtub full of suds. After a few swishes to be sure it was wet, I lifted the mop from the water with my hand on that little lever that squeezes the two sides together and gets out the excess water. The sponge wasn't there. The glue had simply turned loose and the sponge fell right off that little plastic bit that holds it to the mop. I stared at in stupefaction for a minute or two and then my brilliance shined right through.

I plunged my hand into the scalding hot water, grabbed the scalding hot sponge, and pushed it back on to the plastic thing as though the nonexistent glue would suddenly hold it there. When it fell off again, I just stared at it dumbly while flapping my scalded hand in the air.

I'll admit to a few tears at this point. I'll also admit that I really don't function well in the middle of the night. Most people wouldn't still have the sleep-time fog after the stench and the burn. I had wised up some and woken up mostly. Just not enough.

I tried again with my unburned hand.

Eventually, I got the paper towels and a bottle of window cleaner and cleaned up the majority of the semi-solid matter with those, shoving everything in a plastic grocery bag. I only had to stand up a few times from gagging at the smell, and the dry heaves only took a few minutes once. I'm very proud that I didn't tow up. The smell when I walked in the room was nothing compared to bending over enough to get it up with paper towels.

And bending over was nothing compared to kneeling on the rug and feeling a squish underneath my knee. That dog got distance with this shit. There was at least a foot and a half of clearance between the cage and the rug.

As I am a forced-positive person (I'm a natural-born pessimist who refuses to let myself stay that way), I turned my poop covered knee into a good thing by realizing I would never have looked under the little dresser stacker for stray poop if my knee hadn't gotten gooed. I would have searched for the smell for days, missing the stream that somehow made it under there. (See how good I am at silver linings?)

About 30 minutes and one roll of paper towels later, I tied off the grocery bag to hold in the stench and shoved it to the bottom of the biggest trashcan I owned. Then I went back into the bathroom for the mop head. It only took eight trips to scrub my daughter's floor by hand with the mop head.

In only ten more minutes from finishing a deep scrub of the floors, walls, and furniture, I had scoured every inch of my arms and legs, glad for the scalding since germs couldn't live through it and even if they did, they would be sloughed off with the top layer of my skin. I changed my nightgown, gulped several glasses of water, checked to make sure my daughter was sleeping well in the recliner since her room was unlivable with stench still, and went to turn off her light.

That was when I brushed off some poop that had gotten on the door jamb from my mad dash with the crate bottom out the door. Another tub of suds and serious scrubbing of every door jamb I passed through whether I saw poop or not, I finally scrubbed up again and wet to bed.

I couldn't sleep because I could still smell it. I would turn my head to the side and catch a whiff. Each whiff resulted in me sniffing another body part for fear that I had missed some on my skin. I did both elbows first, then tried to smell my hair, and when I realized that I had folded double trying to sniff my own stomach, I called paranoia and decided that if it was me and not just lingering odor, it was going to wait until morning.

It took only thirty minutes of talking to myself to convince my brain to believe me.

I have, of course, bought a new mop head, some Mr. Clean, another mop bucket, several sponges, rubber gloves, and a spray bottle of some sort of degreaser since last night. I have taken the cage and everything that might possibly have been touched by the explosion out of my daughter's room and scrubbed every nook and cranny again. Only one element for my peace of mind remains:

Where do I hide my Mr. Clean?