If you plan on being an active parent, you have to get comfortable with other people’s poop. OPP, if you will. From the newborn stage until your toddler can wipe effectively, you’ll be smelling, cleaning, and disposing of poop. It’s a part of the job. What makes this aspect of life all the more challenging is the fact that children — unlike adults — don’t care about coordinating their bowel movements to fit our schedule. Instead, they go when and where they have to. Unfortunately for one couple, that happened to be on an airplane.
Sarah Penewit, a mom from Oregon, shared the video of her 13-month-old son Dawson’s blowout bowel movement on their flight. Sarah and her husband Mark were traveling to Michigan for a work trip, Newsweek reported. Right as the plane was taking off, the two thought they should change Dawson. “That’s when I noticed Dawson had a brown spot on his clothing — the dreadful blowout,” Mark said.
But that was just the beginning of the mess. Thankfully, the couple had the whole aisle to themselves. Using the middle seat as a changing table, they assessed the damage. “His blow out was out of this world. [It] had moved up his entire back, into his hair, on his ear, had soaked through his clothing onto this sleeping bag, and was all over Sarah’s arm [and] face,” Mark said.
Like most diapered babies, little Dawson didn’t take too kindly to being changed, even though he was covered in poop. He was screaming in discomfort. His mother scrambled to get him clean while his father handed her wipe after wipe, after wipe. “As a new parent, weirdly enough this isn’t the first time and we have become numb to this,” Sarah said.
If they want to relive the moment, they can do so because they recorded the aftermath and shared it on Instagram. In the caption, Sarah shared that poop once ended up on her face.
Several Instagram users had similar experiences and sympathized with the new parents.
“We just built up the nerve to go back to our favourite restaurant after Eli barfed all over the table at one year old.. he’s 13 now!” one user shared.
“I’ll never forget when my 8 month old had the stomach bug and we figured it out while we were on the plane,” someone else commented.
Other people didn’t approve. “Stay home. It ain’t cute,” one user advised.
Another sympathized with the other passengers: “And everyone around you just has to smell it?”
Someone else questioned their disposal methods, writing: “Why didn’t u throw it away in the restroom instead of planting a stink b0mb under someone else???”
No one knows how they’ll deal with such a thing until they’re thrown into that situation. However you do it, I think we can all agree that the world should be more empathetic and understanding of children and what it takes to raise them.
