I have considered blogging about this topic for a while now but haven't due to possible embarrassment. I decided now though that it is more funny than embarrassing and this also gives me a venue to vent. My daughter Natalie has spent nearly a year now attempting to strip down at nap-time with the intent to make a giant mess with products discovered in her diaper.
This started innocently enough. One day I went in to wake my toddler only to find a naked child smiling up at me. At playgroup the next day it was handled like a rite of passage. "Oh yes, Natalie has now tried the whole taking-off-the-clothes-bit that some of your kids have attempted." I foolishly thought it would stop there. Little did I know that Natalie had tasted freedom and now she was hooked.
The second stripping incident was traumatic. As I opened the door, the stench hit me like a raw sewage tidal wave. I wondered for a split second why Natalie's room smelled like a toilet exploded. Then I caught site of some bare skin and nearly fainted dead away. My sneaky little two year old looked like a character out of 'Lord of the Flies.' She appeared as a wild feral child possibly found in the amazon jungles. The difference: instead of being covered with mud and grass, she was covered in poo-poo. It covered her entire body like a kind of war paint or psychotic finger art. There were also streaks of excrement lining her crib headboard, speckling her crib tent, and (gasp) dirt clod sized pieces both in the crib and little ones that had rolled out onto the carpet through the crib tent screen. Before I could consider against it, I moaned a loud "No!" My feral child grinned broadly, obviously proud of her creation. She stood there naked but confident and exclaimed "I have poo poo all over myself..why did I do that?" As I screamed for my husband to come help me spend the next two hours cleaning, I began to realize that this was no small challenge to overcome.
Thus began the many months of trying to one-up my daughter's stripping cleverness. My playgroup was all very helpful and provided a wealth of ideas in order to stop her from (what we started to call) "taking out her poo poos." First we tried putting non-elastic pants on her before bedtime. Natalie had them off the first day. I also tried onesies over leggings but my child would simply unsnap the onesies, pull down the leggings, and go to town. Then we went out and purchased a few one piece outfits where the shirt and pants are all together. We thought that we were finished. Natalie began reaching up through the leg holes and pulling out her art medium. Next we bought sleep sacs which we turned around backwards so she couldn't (we thought) make use of the zipper. We thought wrong since she started pulling her arms in, turning the sleep sac around, and then accessing the zipper. I even tried bribing her with M&Ms whenever she kept her clothes on after nap but she grew tired of the candy and refused it.
At this point, months had gone by with many nap time messes. The crib tent had been disassembled, washed, and then reassembled by my husband multiple times. The crib mattress had been thrown in the backyard and disinfected so many times that we no longer even put a sheet on her mattress anymore afterwards. Finally, after weeks of after-nap showers and cleaning frenzied afternoons, we discovered a solution. Here it is in case any of you out there also have a stripping artist like we do. The answer is duct tape. You put the sleep sac backwards on your child and then put a ring of duct tape under their arms. This way, they cannot turn the sac around to get out and thus, parents, we are home free in a land where poo stays in the diaper!! Wooohooo! Duct tape is like gold around our house. God bless the stuff!
So anyway, Natalie, our stripping artist will now have to find other outlets for her artistic endeavors. And when Noelle begins to shake off her clothes at nap time, my husband and I will be prepared.
This started innocently enough. One day I went in to wake my toddler only to find a naked child smiling up at me. At playgroup the next day it was handled like a rite of passage. "Oh yes, Natalie has now tried the whole taking-off-the-clothes-bit that some of your kids have attempted." I foolishly thought it would stop there. Little did I know that Natalie had tasted freedom and now she was hooked.
The second stripping incident was traumatic. As I opened the door, the stench hit me like a raw sewage tidal wave. I wondered for a split second why Natalie's room smelled like a toilet exploded. Then I caught site of some bare skin and nearly fainted dead away. My sneaky little two year old looked like a character out of 'Lord of the Flies.' She appeared as a wild feral child possibly found in the amazon jungles. The difference: instead of being covered with mud and grass, she was covered in poo-poo. It covered her entire body like a kind of war paint or psychotic finger art. There were also streaks of excrement lining her crib headboard, speckling her crib tent, and (gasp) dirt clod sized pieces both in the crib and little ones that had rolled out onto the carpet through the crib tent screen. Before I could consider against it, I moaned a loud "No!" My feral child grinned broadly, obviously proud of her creation. She stood there naked but confident and exclaimed "I have poo poo all over myself..why did I do that?" As I screamed for my husband to come help me spend the next two hours cleaning, I began to realize that this was no small challenge to overcome.
Thus began the many months of trying to one-up my daughter's stripping cleverness. My playgroup was all very helpful and provided a wealth of ideas in order to stop her from (what we started to call) "taking out her poo poos." First we tried putting non-elastic pants on her before bedtime. Natalie had them off the first day. I also tried onesies over leggings but my child would simply unsnap the onesies, pull down the leggings, and go to town. Then we went out and purchased a few one piece outfits where the shirt and pants are all together. We thought that we were finished. Natalie began reaching up through the leg holes and pulling out her art medium. Next we bought sleep sacs which we turned around backwards so she couldn't (we thought) make use of the zipper. We thought wrong since she started pulling her arms in, turning the sleep sac around, and then accessing the zipper. I even tried bribing her with M&Ms whenever she kept her clothes on after nap but she grew tired of the candy and refused it.
At this point, months had gone by with many nap time messes. The crib tent had been disassembled, washed, and then reassembled by my husband multiple times. The crib mattress had been thrown in the backyard and disinfected so many times that we no longer even put a sheet on her mattress anymore afterwards. Finally, after weeks of after-nap showers and cleaning frenzied afternoons, we discovered a solution. Here it is in case any of you out there also have a stripping artist like we do. The answer is duct tape. You put the sleep sac backwards on your child and then put a ring of duct tape under their arms. This way, they cannot turn the sac around to get out and thus, parents, we are home free in a land where poo stays in the diaper!! Wooohooo! Duct tape is like gold around our house. God bless the stuff!
So anyway, Natalie, our stripping artist will now have to find other outlets for her artistic endeavors. And when Noelle begins to shake off her clothes at nap time, my husband and I will be prepared.
