nastay...a tad worse than nasty

just the other day patrick asked if jack needed a diaper change and without hesitation i promptly buried my nose in the diapered rear of our youngest. and it hit me...i am a different person than i was just a short 3 years ago. i am doing things i would have never believed i was capable of...like smelling butts and leaping out of a dead sleep to answer the call of an inquisitive child at 3 am. the list of what im doing on a daily basis no longer surprises me which is somewhat remarkable if you could only see my days. i wiped snot from georgia on my jeans today. its not that i didnt want to retrieve a respectable tissue, its just that my options were somewhat limited with jack and georgia coordinating their 'need to eat' and their 'need to sneeze' to be the exact same time. and, yes, its disgusting. i would gag if i saw you do it and pretend that i hadnt done the same and yet, i regularly find myself doing the most disgusting of things. today, while changing a diaper, the fountain started and i threw a burp cloth on his little man. i found the same burp cloth, unlaundered, laying on the floor hours later. gross. i also realized gk had used it as a towel for one of her babies moments earlier. double gross. ive inspected finger tips for boogies and butt cheeks for hidden poop. im telling you, im not proud. im appalled, really, at all that i do without flinching, but this is my new reality. and i love my new reality.

we made heart cakes tonight for patrick. we dropped egg shells in the batter, licked the spoon while stirring and sampled the batter...with raw eggs and all. we watched them rise and fall in the oven, added yellow food coloring to the icing on accident and then corrected our mistake with 17 drops of red which left an orangey reddish hue on the cake and did god only knows what to our bodies. it was at around drop 15 i remembered there being some article years ago about the harmful effects of red dye...im assuming it pertained to big m&m factories, not food coloring plants, but either way, i dropped two more in there in my final attempt at 'pink' cakes. and while they werent exactly pink, they were smothered and covered and piled unhealthily high with mounds of orangey red frosting and delivered to patrick with the honest question from the heart of a 3 year old...will you be my valentine? he melted. but only for a moment because this question was immediately followed up with, 'can i have a bite?' and so it goes. my days that start with an audible alarm and end with prayers at the bedsides of the little people.

tomorrow will be another day filled to the brim with moments that melt my heart or make me gag. either way, im blessed and content. and living a completely different life than a short 3 years ago. thank goodness for the whole of it...the good, the bad and the utterly nastay.