This Mom's Tale Of Poop On A Playground Slide Is Parenting In A Nutshell
Hero mom cleans kid’s poop off playground slide and lives to tell the tale
A Facebook post about a mom trying to clean her daughter’s projectile poop from a public slide has gone viral and give this hero woman a free vacation to Hawaii and all the awards. Mom-of-three Brittany Berry went for a run and then took her kids to the playground over the weekend thinking it was the start of a totally normal afternoon. Berry was resting at a picnic table post-run, catching her breath, when her daughter Sadie walks up to her in what she thought was a pair of pee-stained shorts.
“I start to change her and I realize it’s a poop-trophe,” Berry writes in the Facebook post. “I’m talking one of them poops you usually see in a newborn, where it’s all up then back and down their legs and you contemplate just throwing the whole baby away. Still, I’m not panicked. Been there, done that, multiple times.”
Berry goes to help her daughter when she realizes that she just cleaned her car and is out of baby wipes.
“I start cleaning her up and there’s only FOUR wipes. This isn’t a four wipe kind of poop it’s pressure washer or open fire hydrant kind of poop,” Berry adds. “So I start looking for more wipes in the van… frantically searching for more wipes. Nothing. I had just cleaned out the van yesterday.”
So Berry’s searching her empty van for wipes that don’t exist, when…
“Then I hear it, that painful SQQQUUUEEEAAAKKKKK of skin getting stuck to a plastic slide. I look up and yes, of course, it’s Sadie. She’s going down the slide, butt-naked, COVERED in poop, leaving a long skid mark of poop allllllll the way down on her way.”
Naturally, the plot thickens. Berry, being an upstanding citizen, isn’t going to leave a trail of human poop on a public slide, so she races home, grabs an extra pair of wipes, rushes back to the park, blasts the AC, buckles her kids in the van, and then armed with antibacterial wipes, heads back for the slide.
“I got the bottom and the main top easily, but the middle of the slide I could not reach,” she explains. “I tried to climb up it, but was unsuccessful. Keep in mind I’m REALLY out of shape and just ran a mile and a half. It’s 90 degrees, I’m WEAK, uncoordinated. To say I was struggling would an understatement.”
Finally, Berry understands what she must do. She must go down the slide. Herself.
“Instead of risking a head injury I decide to go down feet first, on my stomach, holding on to the side to slow myself down with one hand and wiping with the other.”
“When I get to the bottom, I’m finally satisfied with my cleaning job,” Berry writes. “I turn and see a car parked, a family, all of them with glaring at me. I don’t know how long they were there. I never heard them pull up. They never got out of the car. I genuinely think they were afraid of me — after all — I was an overweight seemingly childless adult, on children’s playground equipment.”
Understandably embarrassed, Berry gets the hell out of there before realizing her shirt is now covered in her daughter’s poop.
“I am NOT getting that on my seat belt,” Berry decides. “I am not getting a ticket or dying from not wearing a seat belt, no matter how short the drive. I do the only thing I can think to do: I drive home in my bra.”
Berry punctuated her story with this cautionary advice for future parents.
“If you aren’t mentally, emotionally, and physically prepared to roll around in another person’s feces, use a condom.”
Also, never clean your van and always have extra wipes on hand, both for wiping butts and well, slides, apparently.
