Mommies can lose touch with shame and propriety.

Disgusting? What do you mean 'Disgusting?'

Lorene warned me that after I had a kid, two words would completely lose meaning. The first was "fluid." The second, "disgusting."
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Friends of mine were kicked out of a restaurant and told never to return after they changed their kids' diapers at their table. While I don't think the restaurant over-reacted, I can completely understand how the couple could momentarily lose all sense of decorum – and hygiene. They've just lost touch with what it means to be disgusting.

I'm not that bad. Yet. But it does look as though I'm in the poop too deep to ever turn back. When Zev used his "baby potty" for the first time the other day, I wanted to take out a full-page ad in the paper. Instead, I waited until the wee hours of the morning to log on to IM and regale the only person online with Zev's tale of toilet triumph.

"Kevin!" I said. "Zev pooped in the potty today!"

I started to type out the whole story....

But Kevin shot back a conversation-crushing nonparent reply, "And moving right along."

"Seriously?" I wrote back. He didn't find this fantastic news?

"Seriously." He replied.

I was a little miffed, but I understood. He probably still thinks fluids come in bottles, full of corn syrup and carbonation.

For me, those days are so far in the review mirror, I have to squint to see them. And I realize that there are no U-turns on this road. Thirty years from now, if I'm in a restaurant and see a woman slurp down a half-chewed piece of cheddar while changing a dirty diaper, I'll just wind past the revolted crowd, casually walk over to her table and ask, "Got any more of that cheese?"

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