the squibix family blog

Harvey's first church service!

We took little Harvey Douglas to Church of Our Redeemer this morning for his big debut! As his proud mother, I was electric with anticipation all day saturday. I took out a brand new skirt for myself and I ironed my whole outfit as well as Harvey's onesie and hat. I woke up at 6am to make sure I had enough time to shower, put on makeup, bath the baby, and pack the diaper bag. I had everything: Diapers, wipes, blankets, change of clothes for him, hand sanitizer, camera... I left the house feeling like a type-A mom!

Everybody ooohed and aahed when we brought in the little guy, peacefully asleep in his car-seat. Harvey slept through the first half of the service, but come sermon time he was starting to look restless, so I took him into the church library to do a feeding and changing. When nursing was accomplished, I took out all the changing things from my bag: changing pad, wet bag, diapers, wipes. I put the changing pad on the couch and laid him on top of it.

What a wonderful marvel of organization, that we can change the baby's diaper anywhere given a carefully packed messenger bag! I pulled up his onesie, pulled off his poopy diaper and put it into the wet bag, pulled out a wipe, Wham! Projectile pooping! Wet orange poop shot straight out of his butt, straignt past the changing pad, onto the couch, and all over my skirt! I had brought a change of clothes for Harvey, but I didn't think of bringing one for me! Frantic, I started going mad with the wipes, trying to mop poop off my skirt and the couch and Harvey's legs which were completely covered. At this point Dan walked in to see how we were doing.

"My goodness Harvey!" he exclaimed, "Is this what you think of church?"

In all fairness, since the spraying shit incident happened during the sermon time, you could at least say that Harvey picked the appropriate part.

We got as cleaned up as we could manage and headed back into the sanctuary, where the priest called us up to the front of the church for a blessing. So there was my parenthood lesson of the day: if spend 20 minutes ironing your skirt, and if it's a day you're going to stand in front of the whole church, your kid will likely poop on you. Welcome to parenthood!

But more importantly, the blessing was very nice, and it included some nice thoughts that we could really use this week: May God really grant us wisdom and devotion in the ordering of our common life, so that we can be for each other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.

And the baby said, "Amen."

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