Dirty Jobs

Our six-year-old's favorite TV show is Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel. If you ever have the chance to watch the show where he works on a pig farm (not the one where he feeds Las Vegas leftovers to pigs), you'll know exactly what my husband does on a daily basis.

As a man who has an officially documented "dirty job," you'd think my husband would be pretty tough--and he is. He spends every day walking around with pig "poo" (to use Mike Rowe's word) stuck to his pants. When pigs give birth, he is the midwife, not hesitating to insert his bare arm into regions of the sow previously considered private.

He collects boar semen using a method I am not comfortable describing, even on the Internet. And should one of his charges pass on to "hog heaven," he again uses his bare hands to haul away the carcass.

So imagine my surprise when the man who oversees the birth of more than 400 beings a year was squeamish at the delivery of one little baby. Contemplate my shock when the man who regularly spends the day covered in poo, is coughing and gagging over a dirty diaper. Granted, our son was famous for his volcanic eruptions of outfit-ruining proportions.

It turns out he's not the only one with a dirty job. This leaves me to change diapers in the back of the minivan while he helpfully gags and holds a plastic bag at arms length. I get the fun task of bathing our daughter after she spreads poo all over herself and her crib. When puke hits the bedding at 3 a.m., I'm the one wadding it up and heading to the washing machine.

When we were first married, I got urinated on by a gilt at one of our pig auctions. Note: NEVER stand behind a female pig. My husband told me to buck up, and I stayed in my wet jeans all evening--even eating at Bob Evans. I really wish I would have reminded him of that the time our son managed to get poo on his father's shirt, pants and shoes while wearing a diaper.

It's a dirty job but someone's got to do it.