Nothing Like a Sunday Morning Poo-fest

Hey blog. It's been a while.

Well we found the train that leads to church, which is great. Even better: this extremely old and friendly couple in the Toul branch lives 10 km away from our village, so they have offered to drive us every Sunday. (I thought our town was small, but I was wrong: they live in a village called Oey that has 65 inhabitants, according to the husband.)

We got up a little bit late on Sunday morning; the train leaves at 7:10 am and we got up at like 6:30. So we ran around like chickens with our heads cut off and decided to bring Henry's Sunday clothes in my purse to save time.

Soooo glad we did. When we got off the train someone named Roger Vincent was waiting for us. He's a nice older gentleman from the branch who had received a call at 10 pm the night before asking him to come pick us up. He was wearing his missionary badge so that we would recognize him as LDS. Roger is very nice and very accommodating. Which is great, because almost as soon as we got off the train Dustin picked Henry up and saw diarrhea leaking out the back of his diaper.

"He's poopy!" Dustin exclaimed, immediately moving Henry away from his body. TOO LATE. Dustin's clean white shirt was smeared with poo. Brother Vincent laughed and said "I had five kids, I know how this goes!" But poor Dustin wasn't laughing.

Henry, on the other hand, was laughing his head off. Kid must have felt pretty good after getting all that stuff out of his system. Really, there was quite a bit of it. On top of which he had just played a really good prank on Daddy.

So, at 8 am, we found ourselves once again running around like headless chickens, trying to find the train's bathroom facilities. The French are not quite as big on public restrooms and public water fountains as Americans are, so we actually had to go out to the platform to find the restroom--which, as luck would have it, was fairly primitive and had no soap, paper towels, or changing tables of any kind. Also not a whole lot of light. Or ventilation. Or anything, really.

The only logical conclusion was to lay Henry's blanket on the floor and change him there. We crouched down on the floor in our church clothes and got to work. Poo, poo, and more poo. It's hard to believe how much poo one baby can produce, but I guess Henry eats more than your average 8-month-old (try like twice as much. He's fat.) Counterintuitively, Brother Vincent chose to remain right up in our grill as we performed this gritty, death-defying act. I really wish he hadn't been there (I wish I hadn't been there either) because it was kind of awkward having just met him, and then five minutes later covering ourselves in poo while he watched. But c'est la vie, right.

Actually, Brother Vincent seemed to find the whole thing humorous. I think I heard him say the phrase "It's a little baby present" about five times. He was also nice enough to give us a plastic bag for Henry's crap-covered pajamas and blanket, and then he even allowed us to put the aforementioned bag in the trunk of his Mercedes Benz.

But not to worry. For, despite having a disturbing orange stain on his shirt for the next hour, Dustin was able to scrub all the poo off him in the church bathroom before the meeting started. I then doused him in perfume and we resumed some semblance of normality. Also, thanks to that extra change of clothes in my bag, Henry didn't end up looking like a white trash baby (even if he acts like one sometimes.)

The Toul branch is nice but very tiny. They have between 30 and 50 people every week. Most of the youth and primary children belong to the same parents; they have seven kids and the father is French but the mother is Irish, so she talked to us in English a little bit. There is also a high school English teacher in the ward, a returned missionary named Pierre-Olivier who got back from a mission in Salt Lake six weeks ago, and two current missionaries from the Nancy ward who are from Idaho and Texas, respectively. So we spoke quite a lot of English after all.

It will be good for our French to have three hours of church every week. Church is different here; they revere the Salt Lake valley as if it were Mecca and I just have to laugh because we were there not too long ago. Our Sunday School lesson was about the Salt Lake Temple. Hardly anyone there had been to Salt Lake and they couldn't quite grasp the concept of a huge desert stretching from southern Idaho to New Mexico. They also focused on cowboys and Indians more than I would have expected. Another funny thing was when I raised my hand and pointed out that even though the Saints were extremely poor, they hired Louis Comfort Tiffany to do the stained glass windows in the temple, which cost a huge amount of money in the 1800's (but today those windows are literally priceless.) In the United States, people usually react somewhat to this fact. In France, I got about five seconds of silence and some blank looks. They don't know who Louis Comfort Tiffany is.

So, that was awkward. But then after the meeting several people asked me to explain to them who Tiffany was. "It's a MAN named Tiffany?" somebody asked. No, I said, that's his last name, his first name is Louis. A French name. He was a jeweler. "The Salt Lake windows are made of JEWELS?" the girl in front of me exclaimed. Ummm, no. Let's see here. Had they ever seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's with Audrey Hepburn? More blank looks. I would have thought for sure they would have seen it, since there are a lot of posters from that movie here. But nope.

Finally the missionaries had to help out; it really wasn't an easy concept to communicate. "He's like the Leonardo da Vinci of America," we told them, "he was an artist who worked with jewels. Very famous. Very big deal."

"Ohhhhhhhhhh, oh la la," said the entire class. Now they probably idolize Salt Lake even more.

Next week we have General Conference in Nancy, and apparently instead of opting for French subtitles they're going to dub over President Monson. Let me tell you what...that sounds like it's gonna be hilarious.