1. 1. First baby has a poop-splosion at a new acquaintance’s house: “OH MY GOSH how are we going to clean this up ALL HANDS ON DECK there’s poop everywhere SOMEBODY HELP because she just got her foot in the poop and both my hands are occupied trying to keep this foot off the rest of God’s creation and this new acquaintance’s fancy house-stuff AND I FORGOT TO BRING HER A CHANGE OF CLOTHES!!!” Third baby has a poop-splosion at a new acquaintance’s house: *quickly cleans it up while humming the five-year-old’s new school song, “Gobble gobble gobble, munch munch munch, let’s have turkey for our lunch.”*
   2. Turns out you use words like ‘poopsplosion’ totally casually and non-ironically. You’re not even trying to sound funny. This word is 100% integrated into your normal vocabulary.
   3. Poopsplosion.
   4. You realize that the bulk of your days with the kiddos is spent making food, setting the food out on the appropriate bevy of plastic dishware, cleaning up said food and dishware, and if you didn’t use the dustbuster/broom/vacuum about every ten seconds, your floor would be a network of crumbs and food fragments enough to sustain a mouse population of 536 that within days would incorporate their town and start a ferocious trade in graham cracker dust and dried raisins.
   5. At the office you’re having lunch with everyone. Suddenly you get the familiar tingly feeling and say, “oops, gotta go pump, my milk is letting down” before making a mad dash to the pumping location. This thoughtless blurting may have embarrassed you after-the-fact with baby #1. By baby #3, it’s like, well . . . At which point you stop even thinking about it because you’re humming this song you heard on the radio once that starts, ‘Let your milk down lassie, let your milk down nooow.”
   6. Yes, the song is about a cow, but it might as well be about you. In fact, you feel a strange kinship with the cow. You sincerely hope that those machines that milk cows aren’t uncomfortable for the poor cows.
   7. If you can’t hear the baby crying, the baby isn’t crying.
   8. You look at the toy basket, which is overrun with cardboard tubes from used paper-towel and toilet-paper rolls, empty Kleenex boxes, semi-ripped empty Amazon boxes, empty crumpled plastic water bottles and think, “aw, anything can be a toy, isn’t this great, the kids are being creative.” You happen to pass by the same toy basket an hour later after the laundry machine beeped at you and the oven is up to temp and the baby’s crying and think, “oh my gosh my house is BECOMING A TRASH PILE!” so you go to throw away something on the sly but your toddler spots it in the recycling bin, explains why she desperately needs that half-ripped Amazon box (because, Mom, it’s a ball-catcher and I use it every day to catch that ball!) and then the only thing to do is return the box to her, crank the radio up and have a family dance party because the mess isn’t as important as thriving kids and dangit, they are thriving and beautiful and when they dance it makes you cry.
   9. You start sneaking in to watch them sleep, because your oldest isn’t a baby anymore and you’re not sure when this happened, and those few moments in the quiet of night when you bend over the sweet little faces caught in the trust of sleep are suddenly precious beyond price.
   10. Any movies or shows that depict children getting hurt in any way are RIGHT OUT. CAN’T TAKE IT. CAN’T HANDLE IT. DON’T WANT TO. Also ones that depict adults getting hurt in any way. Why? Because one day your children will be adults, obvy. Suddenly you find that your only option is The Great British Baking Show.
   11. There’s a piece of popcorn under the piano. You can’t quite reach it. A month later you think, wow, I should really try to get that piece of popcorn outta there. But before you get a chance to wrangle up the right tool for the job, it’s time to a) nurse the newborn, or b) help the child who’s crying in an as-of-yet-unidentified part of the house, or c) nurse the newborn.

I can’t wait to see what the next half-decade brings. But since my youngest is only three months old, I can hazard a guess that the whole ‘poopsplosion’ thing will still be, well, a thing.

Do yourself a favor and say ‘poopsplosion’ three times fast.

Yeah. It’s harder than it seems.