Last night while I had the girls in the tub (all parents of small children stopped reading right there), Sara and I got into a very intense debate about whether or not there would be toys at the new Central Library. Sara insisted that because the new library was HUGE, surely the toys would be BIG.

Momma: Libraries have books, not toys.

Sara: The utter (other) library has toys.

Momma: That was a tiny cabin with a phone inside. I know, it was cool, but it was a phone that read stories…because it was a library.

Sara: The cabin was BIG. It was a BIG TOY.

Momma: OK, fair enough. Maybe they’ll have toys, but I don’t want you to be disappointed if they only have books.

Sara: Lots of new books?

Momma: Well, they’re new to you!

Meanwhile, Kelly was having a debate with herself that was LOUD and INTENSE. Lots of Kelly babbling, Kelly emphasis, and Kelly exclamations. Neither of us even noticed that, OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD, the girls were sitting in a tub of floating Kelly poop. A tub of excrement, if you will. And not an amount that you would anticipate coming out of a 10 month old GIRL. Kelly, pardon the analogy, has had MAN POOP her entire life.

I screamed at the top of my lungs “EXTRA HANDS NEEDED! GREG!!! GREG!!! MAYDAY!! EXTRA HANDS!” I pulled them out of the tub, desperately looking around for some kind of a detoxification zone, where I could hose them down with chemicals only used at Super Fund clean up sites.

After everyone and their thin coating of e.coli were asleep, I headed into the Poop Bath with my bleach solution and some gloves. I had imagined the first Sunday of not preparing bottles, labeling food, and packing bags for daycare, I would leisurely blog on my couch, eating Pringles. Instead, I disinfected every toy in the tub (anyone with toddlers knows that’s about 20 lbs of plastic stuff, most which squirt water that had to be filled and squirted at least 3x before I declared them sanitary), and threw out any toy that had a sponge-like quality. The tub itself? I took a hacksaw, removed the entire thing from the house, and set it on fire in the backyard.

Addendum: The new Indy Central Library is about the coolest library I’ve ever visited. The Kid Area, called The Learning Curve, is divided into pods with extraordinary seating, computers with kid-sized mice, and Mork and Mindy chairs lining very tall windows. There weren’t “toys”, but there was a huge magnetic play wall, chairs easily manipulated by toddlers, and toddler computer games. Sara was perfectly happy with the library she described as “clean, and not dirty at all”. ??? OK, she takes after me AGAIN.