An interesting morning...

Kayla is going through a major independent streak lately. She is almost two and a half, and wants to do everything herself. You can't touch her when she's getting dressed, because she wants to do it herself. It has progressed this week to us not even being allowed to watch her get dressed. As a side note, she is actually doing quite well dressing herself, although she occasionally needs help with getting a shirt off or finding an arm hole.

This morning was no different, she practically yelled at me to get out of her room (a preview of the teenage years to come?) so she could dress herself, and she shut the door behind me. A few minutes pass, and I start to hear some whining coming from the room. This is usually followed by, "Mommy, I need help," but this morning the whining just continued. I thought, "good, she's going to keep trying and not give up - an admirable trait." I decide I'll poke my head into her room to see how she's doing.

I open the door and see Kayla struggling to get her shirt off, with no pants and no diaper on ... and I smell poop. Getting nervous now, I ask Kayla, "did you poop?" and she says yes. My next question is, "where is the poop?" She tells me it is on her diaper, which is sitting over on the floor. I take a closer look, and sure enough there is a log of poop on top of her diaper - not IN the diaper mind you. A pit starts to form in my stomach as I realize this can only end badly. "Kayla, how did the poop get there?" She replies, "I poop my hand." Dear God no.

A major clean up effort ensues, including a ton of questions to try and determine where to focus my cleaning efforts. Did she poop on top of the diaper? Did she poop on the rug that I'm trying to sell this week on Craigslist and then pick it up? Or, did she poop on the hardwood floor and then carry it over to the diaper? Or, did she simply use her hands like a catcher's mitt? The answer to all of these questions was "yes," so it remains a mystery. A horrible disgusting mystery. I did the best I could cleaning the entire room, but only Kayla knows how things really went down in there with the poop.