There are moments in one’s life when we make an idle discovery that, when added to other marginally related details, triggers an alarm in our heads. This happened to me today. Unfortunately, such idle discoveries often happen too late, or become realized in such slow motion that the urgency of the discovery doesn’t penetrate in time to affect the outcome. This also happened to me.

I often let the kids play outside on a nice day, then throw them into the bathtub for a lovely thirty minutes of play time. Today was the first 50 plus degree day in a while, so when we arrived home from Mother’s Day Out, I sent them outside. They delightedly ran into the backyard, and by the time I called them in for dinner, they had run their cars through the sand, sat in the muddy turtle sandbox, rifled through the soot in Daddy’s firepit, and just generally had a grand ol’ time.

I stripped the boys after dinner and tossed them into the tub. Anna Kathryn would love to play with them in the tub, but there just isn’t room. She gets her bath last. While the boys played and splashed and made a mess of my bathroom, I cleaned up the dinner mess and put away their Mother’s Day Out bags. Glancing over the boys’ daily sheets, I saw that William had taken a full nap and finished his lunch. Stephen didn’t eat all his lunch. William had three diapers changed. The last one was being done as I arrived, because they smelled a stinky. Stephen had his usual two diapers. No stinky.

I paused in my cleaning and cocked my head towards the bathroom with a grin. Before AK was toilet trained, she would often poop in the bathtub. It was almost as though she waited for that nice, warm bath to poop. I would try to wait her out, but more often than not she won, and I got to clean out the tub. The boys have never once pooped in the tub, which is nice for them, since they bathe together. I laughed at the Facebook status update I imagined myself putting up if one of the boys committed such an atroctious act: “Kari is…feeling sorry for William, whose brother soiled himself in the bathtub they were sharing.”

I heard an especially loud splash, and at the same moment, AK informed me that her brothers were draining the tub. When I checked, she was right–they were draining the tub onto the tile floor by dumping out the water. As I waded into the room to end their fun, I saw it: the brownish stain spreading through the water. “Who poo’d in the tub?!” I demanded, but I already knew the answer.

I should have known the answer when I saw Stephen’s MDO sheet.