Double-headed Shart Attack: How (not) to take a toddler to the doctor's office

It's been two weeks since I last published a blog post ... and what an eventful two weeks it has been!

On December 23, Audrey had to go to the doctor about a rash on her bottom, and it turned out that she had a case of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease.

Having HFM over the holidays is a pretty shitty turn of events. Mostly because, as a highly contagious disease characterized by lots of itchy sores on the hands, feet, mouth, thighs, and bum, it makes you about as popular as a leprosy diagnosis.

So alas, poor Audrey was banned from the Christmas Eve party, and our Christmas Day guests also understandably bowed out. All of her cute Christmas outfits had to be shelved in favor of one-piece suits that kept her from shoving her whole arm down into her diaper to scratch her itchy butt. It was not fun. I do not recommend it.

The only good thing that came out of it? Look how stinking cute she looked in her hospital gown at the doctor's office:

"Mama I am sick."

But we all survived, and the sores cleared up, and life went on. Yesterday, back to the doctor's office we went for her 15-month well baby checkup. Let me just sigh for ten minutes nonstop, and then I'll tell you how THAT went:

The shenanigans started before we even left the house. Up until yesterday, Audrey had always treated the threshold of the front door the same way a well-trained dog might: she knows she has the ability to cross it, but will not do so unless given clear permission by her masters.

But yesterday, the threshold finally lost its power.

It was a cold, wet, rainy day, and as we prepared to leave for the hospital, I ran out to the driveway to start my car and let it warm up. I left the front door open, because I'm weirdly superstitious about having a closed door between me and my unsupervised child. WHO KNOWS WHAT SHE COULD BE DOING IN THERE. WHAT IF IT LOCKS MAGICALLY ON ITS OWN.

As soon as I turned the car key in the ignition, I whipped around and saw a sweet little baby standing outside, up to her ankles in a puddle, one foot in a sock and one foot bare, holding her jacket in one hand and a shoe in the other. If she could talk, she'd have said something like "aren't you taking me with you? I'm all ready!"

Goddammit. She looked so cute.

Pick her up. Run her back inside. She starts to cry, as her feet are now quite cold. We need a new pair of pants and a new pair of socks. The car is still running in the driveway. We are now late.

Get to the doctor's office and check in. One of the TVs is showing Doc McStuffins, which is a show Audrey apparently enjoys, so we go and sit near that TV. She proceeds to stand 5 feet in front of the TV and point at it, pointing and pointing. What is she pointing at? No one knows. She sees a dog on the TV and starts screaming "WOOWOOWOOWOO", which is her best impression of "woof woof". A woman makes eye contact with this pointing, barking baby, and Audrey rewards her by immediately lifting her shirt up and flashing her big round Buddha belly. One hand holds the shirt up, the other hand rubs the belly suggestively. I tell her to put her belly away, and she starts laughing and takes off across the waiting room, belly blinding everyone who looks over. At this point, we have been at the doctor's office for less than ten minutes. Sigh.

We are called back to have Audrey's height and weight measured, and then told to stay in the part of the waiting room with all the toys until our room is available.

Audrey starts off playing happily with the toys mounted on the wall. When those lose their thrill, she switches to playing with the pen I was given to fill out forms, which has a big fake flower attached to it.

"This pen is WAY better than any of the toys they have in here."

Eventually she decides she wants me to read to her from the "books" they have available, which include a pamphlet about Hepatitis A and a couple issues of Journal magazine.

"First, let me dust it with this flower."

Audrey's interest in learning about diseases of the liver wanes almost instantly, so I open up her diaper bag and pull out a fake remote control that plays sounds with each button. She finds a button she likes and hits it roughly fifteen thousand times in a row. I immediately regret this choice of toy to bring to the doctor's office, because if this remote is making ME want to beat someone to death, I can only imagine the effect it must be having on the people who didn't create the child who won't stop hitting the f***ing number 6 at a rate of four times per second.

Finally, Audrey grows bored with listening to "SIX-SI-SIX-SIX-SI-SI-SIX-SI-SIX" and chucks the remote down onto the floor. She looks up at me, smiles sweetly, and says "uh oh!" What a punk. That was no accident.

As per usual, I give her the remote again -- she always gets a second chance -- but when she chucks it at the floor again, I take it away. "You made bad choices, so now you've lost privileges to play with that toy," I tell her, wondering when the hell I became such a mom. Unperturbed, she goes back to the flower pen until we are finally, FINALLY called back to see the doctor.

The rest of the appointment goes smoothly, thank the lord. We are sent off on our merry way with a smile and a clean bill of health.

When we get to the car, I load Audrey in and then pull a bag of snacks out of the diaper bag. It's 11AM, which is the time she normally eats lunch, so I know she must be hungry. The snacks I've brought are as foolishly impractical as the decision to bring the remote control, though: a ziploc baggie full of goldfish crackers and cut up cheddar cheese. That is a snack that she absolutely cannot eat unattended out of a bag. It's going to be a nightmare. But at this point, I have no other choice, so I roll the sides of the bag down, hand it to her, and ask her as nicely as I can, "please don't make me regret this." And then I close her door and climb into the driver's seat in front of her.

For the next fifteen minutes, I can only watch helplessly in the rearview mirror as my worst fears are realized. The ziploc bag, completely empty, is held up and waved around within moments of our departure. Where are its contents? They are everywhere. Everywhere.

By the time we finally arrive at daycare, I no longer have any naturally brown hair growing out of my head. As I drop her off, the toddlers are all sitting down to lunch and Audrey immediately runs over and sits in a little chair to wait for her own lunch to arrive. The last thing I see before leaving for the day? My little girl stuffing an entire slice of pear into her face while waving happily at me.

Oh, and if you're wondering if Santa ended up visiting her despite her extreme naughtiness, the answer is of course he did. Santa's a pushover.