My kids poop in their own hair.

Rarrrrrrrrrrr

At about 16 months Andrew and Joel went through about two weeks where they regressed back to the developmental age of a 6 month old. Hannah and I use the 6 month old age because several months after we moved back to TX they were evaluated at that level, even though they were about 26 months at that point. Everything that we had come to love about our boys began to slip away, or at least that’s what we felt like. We battled things we never imagined possible.

I need to explain that these pictures I'm posting with these blogs are before the dreaded 16 month mark. We actually stopped taking pictures since they were almost always screaming and when they weren't we were too tired to think about a camera. This is just a taste of the happy boys we had before.

Meal times became a battle each and every time. We never went to restaurants because we were so embarrassed so we only had to worry about trying to get them to eat enough to stay healthy. There were times that we had to force their mouths open and drop food in then hold our hands in front of their mouths until they chewed and swallowed. We finally gave in and just started serving them chicken nuggets and macaroni for every meal. There were so many battles in those first few months that we just gave up on. Potty training was beyond hope. Their bodies started reacting strangely to all foods. They would get explosive diarrhea that would shoot out of their diapers and all the way up their backs into their hair. Seriously, my kids pooped in their own hair at least once a day. Who experiences that?

One night I was faced with the unthinkable. Hannah was working as a server and was gone that evening. I had done my best to settle in for the evening which consisted of putting a movie on for the boys while I lay on the couch and tried to read. It came time for bed and I starting trying to get everything ready. I found pajamas and sent Caleb to go through his normal routine. I then discovered much to my horror that we were out of diapers. I am ashamed to admit that I seriously considered just sending them to bed anyway, even though their diapers were already hanging down to their knees. In a fit of insanity I decided that I would take all three to the store to buy new diapers. I loaded everyone in my sexy beast of a mini-van and we headed across town to the K-mart. Several people commented how cute we all looked as we rolled into the store with Andrew in the top of the basket, Joel in the bottom, and Caleb clinging for dear life on the back. He would stand on the lower part of the basket and hold on to the handle, while I eased up behind him and held his weight with my body as I pushed the cart. We started to get dirty looks when I couldn’t find the diapers and the boys started to scream. These were just short little warning bursts kind of a like an alarm gives before it really gets blaring. I missed my turn and had to make a u-turn with the cart. That was the unpardonable sin because we were no longer in warning mode. They were full on, ear piercing screams by the time I found the diapers and threw them on the bottom shelf of the cart. When we reached the front of the store we had created such a spectacle that the customers and employees literally stopped what they were doing and all stared wide-eyed and slack jawed at the stupid young dad with the two hellacious children (and the third that was still as friendly to the cashier as you could ever ask for). The cashier was so appalled that it took her a second to react when I put the diapers on the belt and reached for my cash just desperate to be out the door. I offered a few apologies and hung my head in shame as I raced out the door back to the van. I managed to get everyone out of the cart and buckled into their seats before I looked at the box of diapers and realized that I had gotten the wrong size. I sat at home that night after the dust had settled and just wept. I felt like such a failure.

We started avoiding anything that remotely resembled a social gathering for fear of exposing the world to all our nuttiness. Our life was a mess and everyone knew it. We dreaded going to church because, no matter how many times it’s dismissed, it’s humiliating when your child bites their Sunday school teacher every week. At the time I was working for a para-church organization in Johnson City as their events coordinator. We had moved there for the job and hadn’t been in town a full year. We were 10 hours from Hannah’s family in St. Louis and 20 hours from my family in Texas. What few friends we had managed to make in the months we’d lived there weren’t really strong enough relationships for us to allow our children to tear up their homes in social visits. We raised our own support at the organization I worked for, but apparently when you’re 23 you only need about $800 a month to live on. Unfortunately no one passed that information along to our land-lord or gas company. It wasn’t long before the struggle to pay bills and raise our family just became too much. Despite our desire to stay, we were faced with circumstances that were beyond our control. It was during those crazy months that we were led on the path that led to owning my own business, but that was still yet to come.