I have a daughter.

Her name is Barney’s Biggest Fan.

She’ll be two next month.

She is sweet and cute and when she wants to know what I’m doing she walks up to me, puts her teeny little hand on my leg and says, “Danny. Dooween?”

Until last weekend, she was allergic to peanuts, dairy products and eggs. The doctor called this weekend and said her blood test revealed that her allergies have essentially vanished.

Last night, for the first time, she drank a sippy cup full of milk.

This morning she came to visit me in the bathroom and her ass smelled like a vat of spoiled cottage cheese on a 100-degree afternoon in  Death Valley. She needed a diaper change and quick, before the paint on the walls started to bubble and peel.

[I want to digress here for a moment to tell you about the most disgusting thing I had ever seen before this morning. When I was in college, I took an environmental science course that mandated a visit to the nearby waste water treatment facility. In the middle of the tour, we were led up a concrete staircase to a viewing platform overlooking a 300-yard-long, 20-feet-deep lake of shit, piss, used condoms, discarded tampons, dead goldfish, soiled toilet paper, foam, vomit, Q-Tips and countless other unmentionables. According to our docent, when residents of this particular city flush something down the toilet, it comes here, to the Great Shit Lake. The aptly named “waste water” is then treated and recycled and the detritus is presumably packaged and shipped to McDonalds, where it is ground up with underperforming drive-thru associates and shaped into little McSausage patties and chicken nuggets.]

I carried Barney’s Biggest Fan from the bathroom to her bedroom with my hands outstretched as far from my body as possible. When I unzipped her lavender footie pajamas, a wave of hot toddler stench nearly knocked me backwards. As I steadied myself, I imagined that first few gulps of milk as it churned through my little baby girl’s guts, festering and souring, producing a foul chemical reaction in her belly and the rank fumes I was breathing.

But I am an experienced parent. I have changed literally hundreds of dirty diapers. And I know that any crap that smells this bad has the power to incapacitate those within a two-mile radius when the velcro straps on the diaper are undone. I girded myself, tried to breathe through my mouth and prepared to witness a new level of excretory hell.

When I peeled back her Minnie Mouse Huggies, Barney’s Biggest Fan laughed. I don’t know if she was laughing because she was proud of herself or if she was reacting to the “Grungnf” sound I made when I saw what she’d spawned. The entire inner surface of the diaper was smeared with a pungent, inch-thick wad of runny, brown nastiness that reminded me of the filling in those rank 7-11 bean and cheese burritos. Steam rose from the diaper, and embedded within the smear were three whole cranberries, the only survivors of the accident.

Evidently, dairy products are to my daughter’s digestive system what Mork From Ork was to the cast of Happy Days --- an unwelcome irritant that spreads havoc and destruction through the whole area. And we haven’t even introduced eggs or peanuts yet. I imagine that when we do, Barney’s Biggest Fan will sprout horns on her head and shoot fire from her cute little ass and demand a personal audience with Barney for her second birthday party. And then I’ll be forced to tell her the sad truth, which is that Barney lives deep in the Great Shit Lake and eats little girls for breakfast, especially those who haven’t yet learned to deposit their disgusting, milk-fueled devil shits in the toilet like normal people.

Comments

call me sick, but when I did that field trip aged 12 I stood and watched all that kinda stuff coming outta the shoot. Wanna know what a HUGE dead rat looks like after it's been through sewerage? kinda bleached and bloated and bald in patches with eyes that rreally bulge. fun for the whole class.
Thankfully the rest of the trip is in that part of my mind that can only be unloacked with 8 years of therapy which luckily, I can't afford.

Oh and what you described is what happened the first time I gave my kid soy.