A Cautionary PeePee on the Potty Tale

Look, I’m not going to lie to you. This story is going to be hard to read if you are a grandparent. It’s going to be even harder to read if you’re a mom of boys. But it’s going to be especially hard to read if you’re a guy. A guy of any age. It’s not pretty.

But you need to read it, nonetheless.

I don’t know if this story will just make you feel better about whatever is going on in your life, or if you are in a position to use this painful knowledge as a cautionary tale for a small boy or boys in your life. I hope the latter is the case, since, as you will soon agree, we as a people never want this to happen again.

I was told this story by family members, and I recently spent the week with the young man in question. He is a brave lad, but to keep his story anonymous we’ll call him Cooper.

Cooper is kindergarten age now, courageously moving on with his life after that fateful day a few years ago.

Cooper’s grandparents had rented a house in Tahoe for a fun week of summer vacationing with their kids and grandkids. They were there a few days early to get everything ready. They could never have known what dangers that innocent-looking vacation rental was hiding.

When Cooper and his family pulled into the driveway after a long car ride, Cooper needed to pee. He needed to pee bad. There was no time to waste.

He jumped out of the car and ran past the open arms of his loving grandparents, making a beeline for the nearest bathroom. A fateful decision that haunts the entire family to this day, but none more than little, innocent Cooper.

Cooper had spent his entire life to this point in a modern house. One with modern toilets that had modern features. Unbeknownst to him, he had just sprinted into a rustic Tahoe toilet time warp.

These toilets had wooden toilet seats. Heavy wooden toilet seats. Cooper’s toilet seats at home were the light plastic variety.

Cooper had recently graduated to big boy status and was all potty trained. He exercised his God-given ability as a male of the species to pee standing up. But Cooper was a tiny little guy still, and as such, he wasn’t much taller than the toilet itself. The geometry of bowl height and leg length lined up just wrong on that fateful day, and the bowl of the toilet was just the perfect height to rest his little ding-a-ling on while he peed.

His Grandma made her way to the bathroom just about the time he was finishing up. Now Cooper, as most boys his age are, is always in a hurry, and that day was no exception. Add to that the fact that Cooper’s modern toilet seats at home have another feature that the hellish, deathtrap of a vacation home bathroom did not – slow-close technology.

Cooper was used to reaching up and ripping the toilet seat back down when he was all finished, because at home it lowered slowly and safely back down to the bowl. His grandmother screamed “Nooooo!” in vain as she helplessly watched the poor young lad innocently do what he always did after rocking a whiz in the big boy potty.

Cooper reached up and slammed that heavy, wooden, non-speed-buffered, bastard of a toilet seat right down on his poor little ding dong that was still positioned on top of the hard porcelain edge of the bowl.

The howl could be heard clear across the lake. When they got his grandma calmed down, it was apparent that Cooper was crying as well.

That poor, brave little man spent the entire first day of his Tahoe summer vacation week with his pants down and an ice pack on his goodies, nursing one heck of a blood blister.

Gentlemen, take as much time as you need and just breathe. There you go. Deep breaths in and out. Good.

Like I said, I don’t know what you will do with this knowledge now that you have muscled your way through this tragic tale, but I pray that we can all use this difficult information to make sure no other boy ever has to go through anything like that again.

I’m happy to report that Cooper came out of the situation with a healthy and perfectly functioning plumbing system, but the emotional scars remain. Two years after the fact, he still asks the owners of any new house he visits if they have “hard toilets.”

We love you, Cooper. Be strong.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Tacos on the Brain

My wife and I are celebrating a decade and a half of marital bliss this year with the traditional fifteenth anniversary gift - tacos. What kind of tacos do you get the woman who has given you three amazing boys and has put up with your crap all these years?

Authentic Mexican tacos, of course.

In Mexico.

(We’re going to Mexico - that’s what I’m telling you.)

In just a few short days we’ll leave the kids behind with their grandma and head out for a week in San Jose del Cabo.

In case you don’t know where that is, it’s the other town on the end of Baja California, right next to Cabo San Lucas.

Cabo San Lucas is the town you go to when you’re young and want to play in the water all day and party with Sammy Hagar all night. San Jose del Cabo is the town you go to when you’re forty-five years old and don’t want to do upside-down tequila shots anymore.

My wife and I have been working together as a well-oiled marital machine now for fifteen years, so we are dividing up the chores to get ready to leave for a week in the same way we always have. When a team works this well together, there’s no reason to change things.

My main job, with any impending vacation, is to remain relaxed and act as the voice of reason. My wife hates this voice and refuses to listen to it. Her main job is to lose as much sleep as possible in the days leading up to travel, worrying about anything she can possibly dream up. And by “dream up,” I don’t mean actual dreams, because she’s awake in the middle of the night making lists.

My wife’s main concern seems to be the care and feeding of the children. I continue to remind her that they will have adult supervision – in fact, they will have incredibly experienced adult supervision in the form of the woman that got her on-the-job training supervising my wife. I then remind her that she survived childhood just fine, and even went on to thrive and create babies of her own, and we’ve been caring for them for so long now that we desperately need to leave them and go have authentic Mexican tacos without them, and they will be just fine eating mac ‘n cheese. This prompts her to write another shopping list.

She makes a list outlining all the school end-of-year field trips and activities that will occur while we’re gone. I remind her that the teachers know where to go, and every activity will start and end at the school, so Grandma doesn’t need to worry about it. She scowls at me and adds the school address to the list.

She makes an emergency contact list of neighbors for Grandma. I tell her that 911 is really the only number she’ll need. She asks me to do something useful. I Google “best tacos in Cabo” and save the locations to my phone.

She revises her packing list and decides a shopping trip is in order because she has nothing to wear for dinner on day four. I tell her the taco place won’t mind if she shows up in the same outfit. This does not help. She makes a list of all the lists she still needs to make.

Speaking of clothes, one of her other pre-vacation duties is to pack at least a week and a half ahead of time. I could understand that timeline if we were mounting an expedition to a remote part of the globe that had no civilization, like Antarctica or Detroit. But we’re going to a really nice resort in a modern Mexican tourist city. I am planning on packing my swim shorts, possibly another pair of shorts, my toothbrush, and a shirt. I will handle that the morning we leave, about ten minutes or so before we need to head for the airport.

(Just kidding. She’d kill me. I’ll pack at least an hour before we leave.)

I’m not kidding about the lists, though. She actually started writing me lists three or four months ago, with all kinds of things for me to do. I’ll give you a few examples of this crazy stuff if I can find one of them... Hang on… here it is.

1) Book hotel – OK, that one was pretty important. She sat me down at the computer and we did this one together. I don’t think she trusted me with it.

2) Figure out airport parking – C’mon! Not a problem. It’s an airport. Of course they have parking. No action required.

3) Make the cell phones work in Mexico – Why wouldn’t the cell phones work in Mexico? They work just fine in San Diego. No action required.

4) Get passports out – No sweat. They’re around here somewhere, in a drawer, or the kitchen, or maybe a box in the garage. I’ll find them easy enough. I can do that later.

5) Buy plane tickets - …

Uh… I have to go now. I just remembered something I need to take care of.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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A Tale of Two Soakings

Jet lag is an amazing force of nature. When combined with alcohol in adults, jet lag can produce an effect much like getting shot with a tranquilizer dart big enough to take down a rhinoceros. It is even more powerful in children, even without the alcohol.

Mostly, jet lag simply produces long and unexpected periods of deep sleep. Occasionally, however, it can produce unexpected urination as well.

A long, long time ago, when I was an elementary schooler, our folks took us to Europe. I had barely ever left the west coast before, let alone flown half way around the world, so major time zone changes were something new to me. When we arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house in England mid-morning, I immediately passed out on the first soft horizontal surface I came to.

I woke up hours later, groggy and feeling like my arms and legs were made out of lead. It was still daylight, and as I wandered down the hallway, I passed one of my cousins’ bedrooms, where my mom and my aunt were puzzling over a strange wet spot on the carpet in the middle of the room. “What could have caused this?” they wondered aloud to each other.

As soon as I saw it, a wave of foggy, dreamlike memories came over me. At some point that day I had “woken up,” needing to pee really badly. I scurried around the unfamiliar house, desperately trying to find the bathroom, but to no avail. When I found an empty bedroom instead, my sleepwalking, jet lagged brain said, “Perfect!” and I peed all over the carpet. Then I just went back to bed.

Once I was actually awake and witnessing the aftermath of my semi-conscious brain’s poor decision making abilities, I was horrifyingly embarrassed. I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I was surely old enough not to want to cop to something as idiotic as peeing on the carpet. I just shut my mouth and walked in the other direction.

That was my first experience with the power of jet lag.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago when we took our boys to Europe. Good news; it’s still there! Bad news; so is the jet lag. This time, however, it didn’t strike right away. The adults adjusted quickly, despite the copious amounts of Italian wine that the waiters kept bringing us for some reason. The boys seemed to adjust quickly as well. Little did we know that jet lag would rear its ugly head more than a week into the trip.

We spent a wonderful week plus in Italy (with among others, my mom and my English aunt), then moved on to Austria. That’s when it happened: A similar - yet at the same time very different - jet lag peeing incident involving one of the boys.

Now, we have a notorious and storied sleep pee-er in our house. You have read about his carpet and stair peeing adventures from time to time in this column. Strangely enough, it was one of his brothers, and not him. I won’t tell you which brother, to protect the unaware. He still has no idea any of this happened.

There we were, on our first night in our Austrian apartment near Innsbruck. A magical day of summer mountain luge track racing and gondola rides awaited us. We settled into our beds, with two of the boys on a bed in the living room, and one of the boys sleeping with Grandma in the room next to ours. I was just about to go to sleep when a commotion arose in Grandma’s room. Grandma could be heard saying things like, “What are you doing?” and, “What the hell!?”

I was getting out of bed to investigate when she came out of the door to her room, looking more than a little bewildered and slightly off put, shall we say.

“What happened?”

“He just peed on me.”

“He peed in the bed?”

“No! He got up, came around to my side of the bed, and peed on me!”

No wonder she looked a little miffed.

Apparently, our jet lagged son’s semi-conscious brain somehow mistook Grandma’s side of the bed (and consequently, Grandma), for the toilet. He just got out of bed, walked around, stood there, peed on her, then walked back around and got back into his (dry) side of the bed, still fast asleep.

So instead of going to bed, I did laundry in the bathtub for a while.

Given my jet lag/urination history, I can sort of sympathize with him, but this kid took things to a whole new level. Dude, are you trying to get cut out of the will? You peed on your grandma! Seriously, who does that?

Thankfully we were able to find enough wine the next day that Grandma was able to laugh about it. Briefly. As for the boy, he’s still clueless.

I guess some people just react differently to jet lag than others. All I know is it’s lucky for our boys that I only peed on the carpet when I was their age. I’m pretty sure if I had peed on my aunt back then, I’d still be too embarrassed to make eye contact with her, so we probably wouldn’t have made the trip back this summer.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

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When Good Grandmas Go Bad

We took a road trip recently, and brought my mother-in-law along. Actually, I should probably say, “she came with us.” She’s not really old enough yet to be “brought along.” I think that phrasing changes as soon as the person stops being able to help drive. Or when they start to drool on themselves. Anyway, she piled into the Ford Expedition with my wife and me and the three boys, and we headed north for Portland, OR, a mere ten hours away. We left early, and had our first stop for gas two hours into the drive, at 8:00 A.M.

It was at this stop, inside the Shell station's convenience store, that I realized she is going crazy.

When the gas pump had finished draining my checking account balance into the tank, I went inside the store to buy a drink with my leftover change. There stood my seven-year-old, holding a king-sized Kit Kat bar the size of his head, asking if he could have it.

"Of course not.”

“Well, if he can't have that, can he have a donut?" inquired his grandma, on his behalf.

 "Absolutely not." I replied, slightly bewildered that I was having this conversation with either of them, but especially with the adult.

"Well, why not?" she asked.

 "Yeah, why not?" my son chimed in.

"BECAUSE IT'S EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING!”

"Well, what does that matter?" she asked. "It's a road trip."

She had obviously gone completely off her rocker. Why does it matter? Well, for starters, we don’t normally feed the children 18,000 mg of processed sugar for breakfast. We usually shoot for actual food. On top of that, we try to avoid feeding them enough sugar to power a small city when we are going to be cooped up in the same car with them for EIGHT MORE HOURS!!!

I jokingly say she had gone crazy, but that was obviously not the case. She was able to carry on a perfectly coherent conversation, despite the fact that she wanted to feed the children hyperactive fit-inducing amounts of sugar. Since she was lucid in all other areas, I pondered why an otherwise sane woman would want to lock herself in a confined space with three sugar-crazed Tasmanian Devils.

Only one answer makes any sense. She’s trying to earn points with them. You see, us parents usually have no concerns over being the favorite. The kids get one mom and one dad, and that’s it. You're stuck with us kid. Too bad. Grandmas, on the other hand, usually have some competition. Now, our boys’ two grandmas get along great. They love each other to death, but I am now sure that they are secretly at war for favorite grandma status. And sugar, in one form or another, seems to be the main weapon in their arsenals.

When my mother-in-law comes to visit at our house, she gets up early each morning to walk to the nearby gas station to get the newspaper because my wife and I don't subscribe. I would like to sound hip and say that’s because we get all our news electronically, but the real reason is that the paper is expensive and always filled with depressing news. Why would I want to pay to be depressed?

Anyway, she always comes back with the morning paper, and some form of Hostess brand sugar for the kids. She does this so often that our kids refer to Chevron stations as “the donut store.”

The first morning we were in Portland, she took the boys and walked from the hotel down to the grocery store a few blocks away and came back with the morning edition of the Oregonian, a gallon of milk, and two boxes of cereal.

Cocoa Puffs and Trix.

Really, grandma? Was there no cereal with a higher sugar content?

Our kids have never even seen or tasted those cereals in real life, but they have apparently been waiting for the right time to try and get their hands on some after seeing them on commercials. They are smart enough to know who to ask, because grandma’s explanation for the purchase was the ever-popular, “They asked me if we could buy them.”

Oh, well, then I understand. There’s no getting out of that trap once they ask nicely and all.

She followed that up with, “Don’t worry, we decided they only get one bowl per day.”

Oh, good. I was afraid it would take less than a week for them to develop diabetes.

I was raised on healthy food with no traces of processed sugar. I would almost go so far as to say my mom was a health food nut before it was cool. She put wheat germ on our cereal and yeast in our orange juice. It was special. Today, as a grandma, she still can’t seem to bring herself to give junk food to a child, so she has taken a different route. She vies for favorite grandma status by providing them with their favorite fruits. Since she is competing with pure, refined sugar, she has to go out of her way to find exotic fruits that my wife and I would never think of buying. It started with simple pears and pineapples, but it has ratcheted up as the years have progressed.

“Nana is here, and she brought us kiwis, papayas, mangos, passion fruit, and something called a cape gooseberry!”

I guess the sugar from the fruit is a little better for them than the junk food, but the “healthy” treats are not without side effects. I’m not sure which I like less: Dealing with the emotionally un-wound child who ate too many Ho Hos, or the digestively un-bound child who ate too much pineapple. Can I see what’s behind door number three, please?

As I reflect a little more on my own childhood, I realize the grandma/sugar conundrum is nothing new. My sisters and I only had one grandma, so she wasn’t even competing, and she still gave us “syrup in every square” on our Eggo waffles at her house. My mom would cringe when we told her, and we thought that was endlessly funny, just like my boys do today.

All the same, I wish the grandmas would compete with each other by buying the boys shoes or underwear instead. Those we can use!

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

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