It looked like a murder scene. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or put up 'crime scene' tape and walk away until a trained professional could be contacted. The smell was worse.
To fully understand the experience, you need a little backstory.
Twins aren't all bad. There are occasional benefits to having two babies at once. One of those benefits is bedtime. While parents of singletons are cajoling, rocking, singing, and otherwise desperately trying to coax their little lonely child to sleep, twins have a crazy slumber party every night. Lila and Victoria happily go into their cribs every night (or mostly every night), and then yell, squeal, holler, giggle, chat, and jabber away at each other until they fall over and go to sleep.
On the night of July 18th, nothing seemed that unusual. Maybe in retrospect, the twin-time all-the-time slumber party seemed more gleeful than usual. Maybe there was a little edge of naughtiness to the sound of their laughter. Maybe, had we listened harder, we could have even heard the girls say some key words to alert us to the shenanigans. But at the time we noticed nothing. So it was with blissful ignorance and the expectation of looking in on little sleeping babies that we opened the nursery door around 11 PM that night.
Three things had taken place. Two of which must have happened in a certain order, but we'll never know for sure when the third event took place. The first two events were Lila unsnapping the crotch of her pajama onesie and taking off her diaper. The third was the poop.
It was everywhere. Lila was curled up, asleep, in the aftermath of Poopfest 2006. She had played with it, painted with it, perhaps even used it in short puppet-show morality plays for Victoria's edification. Her hands looked like she was wearing poop gloves. It was in her ears, in her hair, and at one point, possibly as sleep approached, she had rubbed her eyes with it. There were very few places that the poo had not touched. It was all over the sheets, the wall, the crib, and the floor. If someone had set off a small, controlled thermonuclear poo bomb in her crib it could not have been worse.
Maybe she made the poop after she had taken off her diaper and then, with nothing else to do she decided to play with it, but I don't think so. Instead, I imagine her making the poopy party favor first, then saying to herself, Man, I gotta get me some of this, and working those snaps and that velcro until, presto! Poop-o-rama.
Now, I've told this story a number of times since the incident and almost every listener has asked the same two questions: Did you wake her up? Did you take a picture? Somehow I feel these two questions are far more disturbing than the entire incident itself. But in case you are also wondering, yes, we woke her up. To even wonder otherwise means you clearly have not properly imagined the scene. I showered her and my wife cleaned the bedding. Neither of us could stop laughing during the whole procedure. And, no, we did not take a picture. To our credit, it didn't even occur to us.