Operation Dumbo Drop: How My Toddler Defaced a Disney Monument

If you've ever been the parent of a small child or been associated with the parent of a small child or simply ever been in the same room as a small child, odds are you have picked up a poop story or two. You might even have picked up some actual poop. Out-of-diaper experiences are just one of those milestone markers that make you a true parent like getting milky barf on a nice shirt and accepting a glistening lollipop that your cold-stricken child has decided to share with you. But poop stories generally top the charts for sheer grossness and uncanny ability to instantly make you the pariah of any social setting.

You've probably got a few pungent tales you could tell. I'm sure your poop stories are hilarious, embarrassing, and completely impossible to tell in a meal setting.

But are they epic?

An epic poop story. That is what I am here to tell. One for the books. I've got you beat, you see. My wife Heather, my daughter Aubrie, and I, we have been party to the most outrageous confluence of events and effluence of baby waste the world has ever seen.

Allow me to recreate for you the perfect storm. It is October 7th, 2011, Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida, and my wife and I are in line for Dumbo the Flying Elephant, together with Heather's immediate family. Aubrie is twenty months old, and the trip so far has been a blast for her, though not in the way that it's about to be. She's loved meeting all the characters and riding all the rides; believe me, despite not yet being two years old, she "gets" it. The weather has been good and the lines have been generally short. All in all a parent couldn't hope for a better first Disney World experience with their first child. But every vacation needs a good disaster story, and we have a doozie in store for us. It stems from the fact that Aubrie has sever constipation and has been on a prescription laxative for several months.

Some of you have just remembered that you have some other important article that you really need to read right now, preferably one that could never ever show up as a search result for "baby laxative." I can hardly blame you. For the brave and the masochistic, we shall continue.

Her constipation is mostly under control with the laxative, but every so often we forget to give it to her or she simply needs an extra dose. This results in what I've come to think of as "The Plug," which is a hard, troublesome turd that is later followed by...well, it's The Plug. Let's leave it at that for now. Although for the most part anything that happens after the Plug is manageable. Messy, sure, even by baby standards, and sometimes we get a clean diaper on her only to hear the report of round two (or three, or four) a few seconds later, but that's the worst that would even happen. Historically.

So now you can see the storm clouds on the horizon. There are some actual, non-metaphorical storm clouds nearby too—this is Florida after all. But that comes into play later.

That day at the Magic Kingdom was a Plug day. Aubrie uncorked that morning just as we had reached the very front of the line to meet Tinkerbell, which is the very height of A-list celebrity encounters for a little girl. This resulted in an emergency changing session and required us to wait in line a second time. Over an hour out of our day spent waiting to get Aubrie's picture taken with a Disney employee wearing a green dress. If you calculate that against the total cost of our Disney World trip that hour cost $117.54, and that doesn't even account for the fact that I just made that number up. No biggie, as far as parenting crises go, and it was worth it anyway; Aubrie lay in her stroller for a long time after that, just muttering, "Tinterbell," to herself over and over again. She was utterly starstruck.

It was still early October, but the Great Pumpkin had already come to the Disney parks, creating another soon-to-be-significant wrinkle. The Magic Kingdom officially closed at 7 PM, at which point Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween began. Children could go around and trick-or-treat at the rides, all good officially licensed Disney family fun, except that participating in the event required purchasing a wristband on top of your regular ticket. We opted out, deciding to squeeze in a spin on the iconic Dumbo ride before we called it a day. So there we were, at 6:40, oblivious to the horror that was about to unfold.

We were just about to get on the ride. Aubrie's timing was impeccable that day. As the group ahead of us started their magical elephant flight we were counted off into a holding area separate from the regular line. A fairly cramped holding area. With gates, one of which would eventually open out onto the ride and the other of which they shut behind us with a friendly click. You never see the trap for the cheese.

Aubrie tolerates lines fairly well, but we still traditionally spent a lot of time trying to invent things to keep her occupied apart from finding germ-covered things on the ground. We usually have to make do with what we have on hand; one of her favorite games is "Hide the Credit Card," but at the moment she was favoring "Be Indecisive About Whether You Want To Be Held." So she was popping up and down like a groundhog, and Heather was doing the lifting. Until one point when she went to pick Aubrie up and she felt...warmth.

Aubrie soaking through her diaper is a fairly regular occurrence. I think her bladder capacity is half a gallon, and as any veteran parent knows, urine is a fairly inoffensive excretion. Heather casually inspected the damage to decide whether this spill warranted changing Aubrie into her spare outfit after the ride (yes, this is how blase we get). Except the warmth she was feeling was not pee. "Eric?" she said in a quavering voice, and my jaw dropped and my brain shorted out as Heather came up with what I can only describe on a family-friendly website as a fistful of yuck. A steaming, dripping fistful of yuck.

"Oh my God," I said.

"We need to get out," she said. "Quick, get an employee and get us out of here."

"Um," I said, standing stock still. I like to think that my primitive paternal instincts kicked in at this point and I remained nearby so I could be watchful for predators.

It was all down Aubrie's pants and shoes, all down Heather's shirt and pants, and there was a pile on the ground between them. At Aubrie's colon capacity I can only guess. My mother-in-law finally realized what was happening and started working her way through the crowd to find a cast member.

She was not alone. Slowly the crowd pressing at our elbows became aware that someone had dropped the mother of all baby deuces in their midst, and panic began to set in. And because reality wasn't bad enough, some big stupid dumb idiot decided at that moment to scream, "Oh my God, she's having a seizure!"

Really. This is one of those things you can't make up. I have no idea who this gentleman was or how he came to this conclusion. He must have reasoned that there could be no other logical reason for a one-year-old to lose control of their bowel function.

In an instant we became the world's least desirable people. It's amazing how much room a group of people can make in a cramped space when they put their minds to it. An employee managed to get a gate open leading away from the ride, and Heather stalked away with Aubrie, still dripping. I followed like an anxious dog, trying not to track in it.

We found a restroom, and I was suddenly promoted from my self-appointed position as emotional support. "Change her!" said Heather, thrusting Aubrie at me.

"But," I said, "this is a two-person job!" Really I was just trying to be practical. She could recruit her mother or one of her sisters. The only other male in our group was my father-in-law, a man who has made it clear how "hands-on" he wants to be about Aubrie's upbringing, especially since laxatives became involved. I'm already looking forward to the pick-and-choose approach to child-rearing that a grandparent enjoys.

"I am covered in yuck!" she screamed, only "yuck" in this case was actually a much less magical, less family-friendly word. With that she left me holding Pigpen at arm's length. Over my shoulder was the backpack we had been using as a diaper bag. Against this onslaught it seemed a thoroughly inadequate weapon.

At this point things started to get crazy.

Heather dashed into the ladies' room, still cupping a fistful of baby chili. Since she thought that sauntering right up to the sink and rinsing diarrhea off her hands might raise some eyebrows, she opted for the handicapped stall, which was one of those deals that have its own sink. The water came out at such a slow trickle that she had to wonder whether she had actually turned the tap on or if it was just leaking, and it didn't exactly rinse the filth from her hands so much as it slowly eroded it away over the course of eons. A few million years later she emerged. Her hands were somewhat sanitary, but her clothes were soaked through and still smelled like poo, only it was now the smell of wet poo mixed with hand soap and a hint of despair.

I dashed into the men's room (a lot of dashing going on all around at this point, really). To Disney's credit, most of their bathrooms are spacious, and they have deluxe marble-finish changing tables set in recesses in the wall, which are downright palatial compared to those rickety plastic foldout things you see at most places that resemble medieval torture devices, only far less sanitary. So at least I had a nice place to lay Aubrie down and try not to let any poop escape the actual boundaries of the table, since no goal short of that seemed realistic. Aubrie, sensing that this was an extremely stressful situation, decided it was time to start wriggling around and doing her version of singing, which by most standards equates to yelling, only longer and louder. If there's one thing Disney World has taught her it's that the acoustics in public restrooms are awesome and must be taken full advantage of.

Meanwhile, back at the Dumbo ride, Heather's family, sensing that Heather and I were in over our heads...still rode the damned ride. Yep. My mother-in-law spurred them out of the corral, ordering them to take the furthest Dumbo down as if that would somehow conceal them. Someone in the crowd leveled an accusing finger at my sister-in-law Chelsea and demanded, "Weren't you with them?" to which she vehemently shook her head. We've taken to calling her Peter; the cock has crowed. I don't know what Mr. Seizure was doing at this point. Maybe he was congratulating himself on his decisive action or maybe he was alertly listening for someone to pause in mid-sentence so he could scream that they were having a stroke.

It was also time for ol' Dumbo himself to take a break. After my traitorous in-laws finished their time on the flying elephant the operators shut the ride down. Apparently at that point a hazmat team descended on the ride, yellow rubber and everything, to clean up in the wake of my daughter's output. Flamethrowers were involved.

Heather ran to one souvenir shop after another, still giving off the general appearance and miasma of a hobo with a glandular problem, to find a change of clothes. The only complete adult outfit she was able to find was a hideously ugly orange getup featuring Capri-length sweatpants and maybe a graphic of Minnie Mouse somewhere on the shirt. Something of a fashion faux-pas, in other words. The details are fuzzy to me because I had other things on my mind at the time and it's difficult to extract the specifics from Heather because she cringes at the mere mention of the outfit, which in the spirit of Disney Magic cost over $80 or 4/5ths of a Tinkerbell autograph. I think that if she opened her closet tomorrow and found only that outfit and a set of damp poop-smelling clothes she would feel torn.

After fifteen minutes, give or take a year, of wrangling I had Aubrie re-diapered and dressed, and I had a pile of yuck clothes that I had more or less folded so that all the poop-covered surfaces were not touching the changing table. It was no easy feat. A quick inventory of the backpack had revealed a pack of travel wipes about one-third full. I'm still not sure how I managed to stretch that meager quantity enough to clean up both Aubrie and everything that Aubrie had touched and therefore smeared with poo while I tried to change her. It must have been a miracle, like the time when Jesus, faced with a crowd of five thousand hungry people, used a mere five loaves and two fish to wipe all of their butts. But now I had Aubrie in one hand, dangling limply and babbling and in general becoming sillier and less helpful by the minute, and with the other hand I was desperately mashing buttons on my cell phone trying to get one freaking person to pick up; not answering cell phones during an emergency is a tradition in my wife's family. I was dimly aware that there were at least two other men now standing in the bathroom with their own diaper-age children, waiting for me to get my poop wagon rolling so they could get on with their own lives.

I finally got Peter, I mean Chelsea, to pick up. I asked her to get my father-in-law to grab a merchandise bag from one of the shops and bring it into the men's room so I would have something to put all the poopy clothes in. Then I asked again. I asked a third time. She couldn't hear me because Aubrie was singing a moving rendition of her favorite song, "Incoherent Lead-up to Extremely Long Loud High Note in B-flat." Finally the last thread of my sanity snapped and I screamed, "I NEED A BAG FOR AUBRIE'S YUCK-COVERED CLOOOOOOTHES!" Although if you think I actually said "yuck" I'll just let you live with that comfortable delusion. Whatever I said, I screamed it at the top of my lungs. In the middle of a public restroom. In Fantasyland. At the happiest place on Earth. It's fairly safe to say that there were children present.

I used the last remaining diaper wipe to clean the spittle off the wall from my phone outburst and stood there fuming while Aubrie got frustrated with me for not letting go of her hand so she could roll on the bathroom floor. Five minutes later I came to the self-pitying conclusion that I was being ignored, but doubt gnawed at the back of my mind. Something about seven o'clock?

Presently the guy behind me cleared his throat. "I couldn't help but overhear," he began. Only natural, because they probably heard me in Key Largo. "But I happen to have a trash bag..."

If there's one thing I truly regret about this incident it's that I failed to adequately thank this man before he flew back to Heaven. I choked out a gravelly, "Oh my God, thank you so much, thank you," but I was a bit too embarrassed by what he couldn't help but overhear to meet his eyes. Still, sir, if you're out there, you're a life saver and a saint. I shall start carrying trash bags with me wherever I go in honor of you.

I stormed out of the bathroom, still feeling miffed. I had the backpack on my back (one of the straps got gunked, so it was still slightly wet). In one hand I clutched the trash bag, and Aubrie was still dangling from the other. I was trying to be indignant, but that feeling was quickly giving way to icy foreboding. The overall atmosphere of the park had changed and I began to suspect why I was now alone with a one-year-old and no stroller at the very back corner of the Magic Kingdom.

Sure enough, a phone call confirmed it. Shortly after Heather had washed up the Not-so-Scary witching hour had begun. The wristband rule fell into place, and a group of Nazi Disney employees descended on the park to make it as difficult as possible for ordinary bare-wristed peon park guests to do anything other than get their kiesters out of the park. To be fair to the Disney conglomerate, I have very little that I can say negatively about the Walt Disney World staff. Except for these guys.

The trouble began when Heather tried to return to the ladies' room to change into her hideous new outfit. "Halten Sie!" said one of the cast members. "You must leave!"

Heather gestured to her soaked, stinking clothes, hoping they would speak for themselves. When that failed she said, "I just need to change my clothes!"

"Nein! You may not enter this bathroom unless you have a wristband! Go! Macht's schnell!"

In similar fashion they blocked my father-in-law from bringing me a plastic bag, which was doubly bad for him because he was starting to feel a little gurgly in the colon himself. My mother and sisters-in-law were also chased out and even (don't even freaking ask me why) forced to take Aubrie's stroller with them. They made it as far as Main Street, USA, and I made it to the archway beneath Cinderella's castle, before the sky opened up.

It started to pour in a very Floridian fashion and would continue to do so for nearly forty-eight hours. Fortunately, it had been raining on and off for the past couple of days, and Heather and I had purchased ponchos. Unfortunately, they were on Aubrie's stroller.

I picked Aubrie up and charged through the rain toward the nearest store (apparently you weren't allowed to crap during Not-so-Scary Halloween, but you didn't need a wristband to spend more money). Disney World ponchos are a particularly magical example of opportunistic theme park rip-off-erhood. Eight dollars gets you a hooded sheet of durable high quality plastic that will last you for years to come provided that you never get it wet. If you do it turns into Swiss cheese in a matter of hours. I wrapped one of these around Aubrie and me as well as I could, clutched my bag of poo and got detour directions to Main Street that wouldn't leave me wandering around for hours, getting soaked and trying to avoid the Disney Wehrmacht. Then I set off at a galloping trudge. Aubrie sang "Happy Birthday."

Eventually we regrouped. Heather and my father-in-law found a restroom nearer the entrance that had not yet been blitzkreiged, so Heather changed into her hideous new souvenir and my father-in-law did his own less public Dumbo Drop. I got Aubrie back to the relative shelter of her canopied stroller, but by this time we were all, collectively, soaked to the bone. We marched down to guest services and complained and looked pathetic enough to earn a free front-of-the-line ride pass, and one fun wet bus ride later we made it back to our hotel to do laundry and lick our injured pride (not that we had much left to begin with, as any veteran parent can attest).

There is one somewhat overlooked fact about the events that evening that, in retrospect, fills me with a perverse sort of pride. The Dumbo ride. It's the first thing you think of when you think about taking small children to Disney World. It's a national icon. Oh, sure, it's not quite up there with the Statue of Liberty and the major landmarks of Washington, D.C., but it definitely ranks above, say, Mount Rushmore. And for a brief period we—specifically, my daughter and, more specifically, her diluvian bowel movement—shut it down. The Dumbo ride! A source of joy and nostalgia for millions! We shut it down! How many parents can say that? This is a ride that has literally survived hurricanes, but it couldn't handle a little baby poo in the queue.

And that is my epic poop story, and it's better than yours. So next time you're feeling like you've reached the deepest level of diaper hell—your kid was the flower girl at a wedding, it happened in front of both your pastor and your congressman, broccoli was involved, whatever—just remember that it could always be worse. And if you ever feel overwhelmed by it all (the poop, that is), you can always look me up and I'll gladly lend you a sympathetic ear.

And a trash bag.