Dirty Jobs, Brown Family Style

Ever watched the show Dirty Jobs? If you have, you'll understand it when I say I felt like Mike Rowe this morning.

The morning started inocuously enough. Demaree, who has a cold I and Elliot passed to her, asked me to take care of Elliot when he woke at 6:15 a.m. Like any good husband who respects (i.e., has a healthy fear of) his loving wife, I obliged.

During the ensuing thirty minutes, all was well: Elliot ate, and we read some Harry Potter e la Camera dei Segreti. Then it was time to change his diaper -- you see where this is going, don't you? Removing his sleeper, I ran my hand along his back, only to discover he had managed to spread a generous heaping of fecal matter along the whole of his spine up to his neck. This lurid realization led to a flurry of emotions, culminating in Elliot hearing his first Italian swear word.

Having exposed my son to the underbelly of history's greatest language, I carried him to the bathroom, removed his clothes and went to work with many, many baby wipes. During the cleaning process I rediscovered my immense appreciation for mothers: they put up with this crap (pun intended) much more often than we fathers do. In addition, I discovered fecal matter migrates. That's right, somehow this insentient, putrid gunk travels at will. In this case, it migrated all over the ground, to diverse parts of Elliot's body, as well as to my clothing.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. Elliot got clean, we read some more Harry Potter, and Demaree got the sleep she needed. In fine, all's well that ends well.