Today, on the eve of the eve of the eve of the eve of … oh, I don’t know. Her birthday’s on Sunday. This close to Clara Jane’s fifth birthday, I thought that perhaps we had experienced our last poop-related mishap. Her Christmas public crapping would have been an awesome finale to those childhood days of pooping freedom, and I hoped that was the last hurrah.

That was before Clara Jane had her first encounter with The Bubble Gum Medicine.

The good news is, yesterday’s hacking and coughing is from a sinus infection. She won’t be celebrating her birthday with bronchitis: the gift that keeps on creating sputum. That’s what I do on my birthday; I’m not ready to pass my thing on to the next generation.  The infection was bad enough to give her a bit of a fever, so she got antibiotics for only the second time in her life.

I can’t believe it. Not only have I parented a child to nearly the age of five, but I’ve managed to keep her spectacularly uninfected. I think I owe her immune system to all those years of letting her graze on leftovers from the floor at Hartford Coffee’s play area.  Whatever the case, she’s only had antibiotics once before this, way back when she was so little we had to squirt them down her gullet.

She loves The Bubble Gum Medicine. She wants to do shots of it and dance on the bar. Except there’s one little problem. Her intestinal system isn’t used to having its natural flora destroyed with pink shooters.

When I picked her up at school, I noticed a suspicious stain on the butt of her khakis. Oh please no. Please no no no no. Please let that be a darker strain of the playground mulch stains that cover the rest of her body.

I hugged her and took a whiff. She smelled fine. Definitely an unfortunately-placed mulch stain. But still. I had to ask if she had any … problems with her pants. Specifically, I asked if she had any poop in her pants.

“No, I don’t have poop in my pants,” she huffed. “I got rid of it.”

Dear sweet death: Now might be a good time to pay me a visit. I don’t think I want to live to hear the rest of Clara Jane’s story.

It seems she was playing in the classroom when, “I felt a little bit of poop come out all of a sudden. So I raaaaaaaaan to the bathroom, and I pulled down my pants and I said, ‘What the…?’ And then I didn’t know what to say!”

The next question, I hope I never have to ask her again. “What did you do with the poop?”

“I picked it up and threw it in the toilet.”

“Please tell me you washed your hands. With bleach. Why didn’t you tell your teacher?”

“I didn’t want them to say, ‘Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeew!’.” Because preschool teachers are champs at taunting pants-poopers.

I know this was an accident. A few months ago she was aghast that there was a change of clothes in her backpack. “I do NOT need extra clothes for school because I do NOT pee or poop in my PANTS!” This has got to be an artifact of the antibiotics. Poor kid. At least she handled it.

Well, I would have preferred had she not actually handled it. But she did what she thought was right. I offered to draw her a bath while I set fire to her clothes.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the next room when I heard, “Mom! I’m gonna poop!”

I kicked into 911 gear, even though she’s perfectly capable of getting out of the tub on her own. She had poop paralysis, though, so terrified she was of the impending intestinal doom. She stood, and as I started to lift her from the tub, she rared back her pitching arm and released a perfect shitball.

It landed on the toilet seat, about an inch shy of being a three-pointer. I know, I’m mixing sports metaphors but dammit, my nearly five-year-old just threw crap nearly at me! There’s brown water in my house! Well, not anymore. But there was, and I was there, and my kid was standing in it, and shouldn’t we have had this stage about three and a half years ago?

She’s fine. The bathroom’s fine. I set fire to it. From now on we will bathe with the hose in the backyard so that any stray poop can be passed off as belonging to the dogs.

Five seems like it should be a milestone age. It’s too far past the end of toddlerhood, though. That ended around the time the poop-throwing should have ended. The school milestone line has been blurred with Day Out, preschool, and such. So this is what I’m proposing: five shall be the the no poop milestone. On Sunday, I shall offer my child a golden toilet brush, declare her to be a big girl now, and for God’s sake don’t ever make me look at anything that reminds me that you poop like other human beings, okay?