8.19.01
Yesterday at work, a woman and her two daughters came in for haircuts.
While I cut the woman's hair, she told me that they were new to the area, and that she had three children -- a 4 yo girl, Britta, an 8 yo boy, George, and a 14yo girl, Erika, and her husband was going to be doing research at the University, and that she used to be a teacher of behaviorally disordered children ,but that she thought she'd just stay at home with her children for now, etc.
I spent a lot of time nodding and smiling.
And then I cut Erika's hair, and midway though the process, her mother made some sort of comment about Britta "doing her duty."
Somehow, I thought she meant that she was sitting behind me, watching what I did, making sure that I didn't butcher Erika's hair, and I though that was kind of cute. That it was Britta's duty to watch out for her big sister.
But then I caught a pungent whiff of a not-unfamiliar odor, and realized that what the woman had said was more along the lines of, "Britta's doing a doody."
Honestly, I wasn't quite sure what to do in that situation, other than turn around slightly, and actually look at Britta.
She was standing on the other side of a chair behind me, clenching the back of it, her face flushed and contorted with exertion and concentration. She was definitely "doing a doody."
I returned to my task, silently wondering exactly why a four year-old was taking a dump in her britches behind me instead of using the toilet in the other room.
I tried to put the activities going on behind me completely out of my mind, but the stench became overwhelming, and I had to turn around again, where I discovered a preponderance of little brown footprints all over the floor where Britta had finished dropping a fetid, stinky bomb. Britta was standing there, filth covering her from the crotch down to her shoes, as though she had been dipped in chocolate. A large puddle of diarrhea sat on the floor behind the chair.
I brought this to the mother's attention, and then directed her to the cleaning solution we kept in the back, and a large roll of paper towels. All the while she kept saying, "This has never happened before. I've never had this happen before."
I assured her that it was definitely a first for me as well.
I finished Erika's cut as her mother scoured the tile floor behind me.
Thankfully, the left shortly thereafter, and the mother did tip generously, but I can't decide if I am more traumatized by the fact that Britta actually shit all over the floor of the salon, or by the fact that she isn't diaper-trained yet.
