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they don‘t have convenient Velcro openings. You can‘t just untape, wipe, and be done with it. Instead, they‘re like little pants. The load is kind of trapped in there. Good news for the other swimmers, but once I had Liam in my arms, I had no idea how to get that swim diaper off while adequately containing its contents. That is to say, I feared the poop.
    I must have looked as helpless as I felt because the teacher shouted over, ―Some people do it over the trash can. All the other moms who were there with their kids glanced over at me.
    The pressure was on. Now I was supposed to suspend Liam over the trash can with one hand while stripping him down with the other. Huh? Was that supposed to help me? How many hands did she think I had? I couldn‘t get a visual on the midair strip-down, so I went back to basics. I laid Liam down on his towel. I pulled off the swim diaper. Again, either you know this already or it‘s too much information, but when poo is exposed to that environment (pool water, a sopping swim diaper, a hyper child—the trifecta), it loses its structural integrity. There was no…cohesion. Just crumbles of poo everywhere. A horror show.
    I went in for the kill, but a few swipes later I was out of wipes and still facing a seemingly insurmountable mess. I swear, there was actually more there than when I‘d started. Liam writhed and struggled to break free from my less-than-sure grasp so he could get back in his beloved pool. With the heroic sacrifice of his swim towel I managed to get him clean(ish), but when I was done, my operating table looked like a colonoscopy gone very, very wrong. I rolled up the diaper, the uncontained poo crumbles, the wipes, his bathing suit (he could finish the lesson in his clean swim diaper), and all other contaminated items and potentially contaminated items into his swim towel, picked it up—and stopped. Yes, there was a garbage can right there, but I could imagine what the other swimmers would be saying if they saw me throw away a poo-smeared towel. She can’t change a diaper and she throws away towels as if they grow on trees. The garbage can was not going to happen. I stuffed the whole thing into my diaper bag. I‘d deal with it at home.
    I may not be the most graceful mom in the world, but grace isn‘t the point. I don‘t have to be a perfect mom. I can be bad at changing swim diapers or clumsy at stroller-to-car transfers. I just want to be there. To laugh with Liam. To watch him grow.
    To make sure he knows how loved he is every step of the way. I was a Daddy‘s girl, and I always wonder how that affected my relationship with my mother. Liam might be Daddy‘s boy for the rest of his life. There was no way I was going to let that—or a little poop—stop me from building my own relationship with him.
    Later that afternoon Dean came across the towel bundle in the hallway. He pulled back a corner and wrinkled his nose.
    ―What have we here? Oh. That. Yeah, Dean had a good laugh over that one.
     

Is She or Isn’t She?
    W hen Liam was born I was happy. We were showing him off and celebrating at hotel restaurants across Beverly Hills. Having a baby didn‘t make me want to diet. It made me want to indulge.
    And breastfeeding made me hungry. I knew I had some baby weight to lose, but I didn‘t want to think about that right away.
    Some celebrities may be making life hard for other moms by showing up in magazines two weeks after giving birth looking like they‘ve never had a bite of ice cream, much less carried a baby, but I‘m not one of those people. But being in shape is part of my job. Every mom wants her old body back, but usually the harshest critic is the mom herself, looking in the mirror at the pants that used to fit but now have soft belly (sounds nicer than it looks) bulging out over the top. The weeklies are my mirrors. I knew that if I didn‘t get to work and lose the weight, I‘d be hearing about it from them, and they‘d be much tougher than