There's no picture with this post and you will shortly be glad of it.

As with my last post on this subject, I've decided to spare you the visuals. You are welcome.

You would think that in four years of parenting, I would learn to recognize patterns. That I would be quicker on the uptake. But there is a part of me so impervious to the effects of experience and time that it never adapts. It dwells in a timeless place where lessons are never learned, just endlessly repeated like episodes of Caillou. And that part of me asked this morning, “Say... am I crazy or does it smell awful in here?”

One of us-- I won’t say who but it wasn’t me, Scott or Audrey-- had just delivered a payload of doo-doo into a diaper that reeeeeeeeked something awful, but instead of diagnosing the problem like someone who has dealt with exactly the same thing every day for approximately... let’s see...1,460 days, I decided that a sewer main on our street must have broken.

With Calvin standing right there at my feet, a busted pipe was honestly the most likely scenario I could think of.

And I went about my business, assuming that the City of Arlington would be by shortly to deal with it, until the smell became dangerously foul and it finally dawned on me: poop. Of course. Poop! It’s always poop. And so much closer than I imagined. Next time I'll probably think it's some kind of stink-bomb weaponry system being tested on our neighborhood by a covert-ops team, or maybe an invasion of skunks.

DUH.