Kids, hotel rooms & why you should wash your hands after reading this.

I know what you're thinking. Oh My Gross. You let your child eat goldfish off a hotel couch?!

No, I didn't really. She was way past the point of eating them here, she was merely playing with them. Making a mess of them. Giving us two seconds of peace & quiet (aka. pretzels & Nutella). Let me tell you about the actual unsanitary shenanigans that took place in this hotel room.

I will preface this by saying that if you haven't already stayed in a hotel room with a baby/toddler, it is nothing short of a nightmare. I've seen people put hotel remotes in ziplock bags while they use them because of the germs. I'm really not much of a germaphobe, but I draw the line at hotel rooms, especially hotel rooms on the beach that college kids & their beer bongs may have just checked out of. One of those places where you just never know if your child is going to pull a piece of bologna out of the bottom nightstand drawer. Unfortunately there's not a lot you can do, other than keep them contained in their play yard, but that's not really fair (and isn't going to help much when you put them in there to sleep), so just be prepared to go through eight hundred packages of Hand & Face Wipes.
On to the story.

We came upstairs one night after dinner, Harper was up waaaaaypastherbedtime, so we were instantly in tag team mode trying to get the show on the road before there was a meltdown. Harper, of course, is running around the room like a mad woman, ornery as ever, squealing with excitement about being awake.  Five seconds into the "you get the baby, I'll get the bath water, everybody panic" routine, I realize my phone has gone missing. We decide that it probably fell out of the beach bag on the way upstairs, so I step out for a second to look for it in the hallway. Of course I find it immediately, lying on the ground outside of the elevator & rush back into the room.
I hear the water running in the room & peek around the corner to catch Brandon trying to blow up the portable tub that we brought along to shelter our child from the diseases that probably lurk in that giant, wet, porcelain ashtray of a bathtub.
I giggle for a second, then quickly realize Harper is not in there. Brandon sees the panic on my face & assures me that she is in the back room. NAKED.
As I come around the corner, I look down & will never forget what I saw.
My sweet, precious baby girl, wearing nothing but her sunglasses, squatting down on the carpet, taking a shit on the floor.

 A disgusting, human shit. With a huge smile on her face. Which she then proceeds to stand up & walk through, tracking it all across the maroon shaggy carpet.
HOLY. MOTHER.
I scoop the kid up, run to the bathroom in horror & drop her straight into the very tub that I swore we wouldn't touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. Of course I scared the daylights out of her, so now she is screaming bloody murder, sitting in a half-filled-cold-water bathtub, surrounded by particles of floating poop.

Needless to say, the rest of the night was a literal shit show, we called the hotel to get them to do whatever was necessary to "sanitize" the area(s) & spent the rest of our unfortunate stay tip-toe-ing around the contaminated room. It's like when you see a spider & then instantly feel one crawling on you? Yea, like that. Poop, everywhere. I feel like I need to wash my arms just retelling the story.

So the next time you're in a hotel room and you drop a goldfish & still consider eating it or think about taking a seat on the floor to chat on the phone?
Think twice. My kid shat there.