Everyone loves a good poop story

Have you guys ever been around a group of new parents telling baby poop stories?  You know the kind.  There's the one where new dad opens his first really gross diaper and almost vomits while mom laughs.  There's the one about baby getting his hands into his own poop during a diaper change and smearing it all over himself.  And then there's my personal favourite, the "poop blowout", where baby poops so vociferiously that it simply cannot be contained by the diaper, shooting simultaneously up baby's back and down baby's legs so that the feet of her onesie are sagging.

New parents love this shit (pardon the pun).  I can't say I've ever been sorry not to have been able to participate.  But now, even though I remain babyless, I also have a poop story to tell.

As our anniversary gift, M's parents got us tickets to see a show at the Stratford Festival, which is a large theatre festival that runs all summer in the picturesque town of Stratford, a few hours west of Toronto.  Stratford is also now famous as the hometown of Justin Bieber, but we won't hold that against it.  M and I decided to make a weekend getaway of it and booked a hotel room to spend the night in Stratford.  M's folks volunteered to dog-sit so we dropped our friend Buddy the beagle off with them and their hyper-energetic Airedale Terrier on our way.

What we discovered about five minutes after leaving the house is that Buddy is most definitely not one of those dogs that enjoys going for car rides.  Which is unfortunate, as the ride to M's parents' house is about an hour and a half.  On the way there he whined, paced and panted, but eventually he calmed a bit and lay down.

Our drive home was a different story altogether.   Buddy got in the car and immediately lay down.  M and I congratulated ourselves on how quickly we had helped him to overcome his car phobia.  There may have been a celebratory fist bump involved.  And then things went sideways.

I don't know if Buddy was under residual stress from having spent the night away from home with strange people and a strange dog.  Maybe the car was too hot, or we just pushed things by taking him on two long car rides in as many days.  But he was most definitely unhappier on the ride home, pushing himself between the front seats to perch on the armrest and look anxiously out the front window.  We had lowered the back seats so that he had a nice big flat area covered in a blanket to lay down on, but he just couldn't settle.  He moved to my lap, then to the backseat again.  Then he hung his head and puked.  He walked around a little bit, and puked again. 

We thought the worst was over.  We were wrong.

After a few more stressful trips up to the front seat and back, he went to the very back of the car by the hatchback.  He looked at us mournfully, squat, and shat his little guts out.  Then he walked a few steps, and shat again.  A few steps more, and another few little squirts.  By the end of it, what was coming out of him pretty much looked like brown-tinted saliva instead of actual poop.  When he was all done, he went to his dog bed, curled up inside, and hung his head over the side.  If a dog had a hangover, this is what it would have looked like.  The worst part was that we were still about 40 minutes from home when this happened, and had to endure the stench for the rest of the ride.

You'll all be happy to know that once we got home, Buddy quickly reverted to his happy-go-lucky self and forgot all about his car ride ordeal.  M and I, on the other hand, remain traumatized and aren't sure how we are going to handle car rides with Buddy in future.  The only saving grace is that our strategically placed blanket saved us from having to have the entire interior of the car shampooed, or possibly just set on fire and shoved off a cliff.

On the plus side, we now feel adequately prepared to counter any new-parent poop story with one of our own, and to handle said baby poop when/if we should ever encounter it ourselves.

Oh, and we had a lovely weekend in Stratford.  Thanks for asking.