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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What Were We Thinking?

We had an amazing two-week vacation on the east coast with my family, but I arrived home to a mountain of paperwork and a to-do list a mile long. The top of the list is my new book. I finished writing book three of The Sycamore Detective Agency series last month, and my editors are starting to return manuscripts, so I am anxious to get on the revisions and get the book that much closer to being ready.

So, what’s the absolute stupidest thing you can do if you have a bunch of work to get done? Get a puppy, of course.

The boys wrote up a puppy contract just before Christmas last year, and have been harassing us to sign it ever since. It states that we, as the parents, will need to do nothing and pay for nothing in regard to the puppy. In exchange for agreeing to board the dog, they would handle all the care, feeding, and paying.

We were naturally skeptical, based on previous smaller-scale pet experiences. We have watched them literally forget that we even owned goldfish three days after bringing them home from the fair. Also, as far as the financial side goes, between the three of them they have seven bucks, so footing the bill for a dog seemed like it might stretch them a little thin.

After some major private parental deliberations, we decided we would let them slide on a few of the finer points of the financial contract, and bit the bullet. It was time to get a dog. We broke the news to them while we were on vacation, which resulted in some extra security and cleaning fees, since we had to scape them off the ceiling of our Airbnb.

We arrived home from our trip late Saturday night, so naturally, Sunday morning we got up and drove to get a puppy.

Super dumb idea.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever been involved in taking care of an eight-week-old dog, but they are just ridiculous. They’re like having a crawling infant, except you can’t put diapers on them. Human babies rarely shred their diapers with needle-sharp fangs.

We’ve only had her for three days and she’s peed and pooped on our carpet - and this is just a rough guess, since I’m sleep-deprived – about three thousand times. You do not want to visit right now, and if you do, do NOT sit on the carpet.

Actually, on second thought, please visit. You can puppy sit for a night or two! It’s a blast. (Plus, I’ll get some sleep.)

The night we brought her home, my wife told me that I got the first shift since she needed to get up early for work. Fine, I said. No problem. I foolishly thought she meant I would get to sleep in my own bed and just get up when the dog needed to go out. Turns out that wasn’t what she meant at all.

I was getting in bed and she looked at me like I was an idiot. (I get that a lot.)

“What are you doing?”

“Umm… is this a trick question?”

“You said you’d take the first night.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

“Then why are you getting in this bed? You and the dog are downstairs in the guest room.”

“Huh?”

“Goodnight.”

So, I slept downstairs in the guest room with the puppy. That was fun. Between her being in a new house without her mommy, and me being three feet from her, and both of us crying, the dog and I got a combined total seven minutes of sleep.

The next day, while yawning continuously, I got exactly nothing done. I was able to say things like “Potty,” “No,” “Good dog,” and “Dammit, my ankles are not chew toys!” about a million times, though, so I felt good about my day.

After another night of being awake in the guest room, day two provided zero opportunities for getting any work done either, but I did spend about half the day in the backyard asking the puppy to go potty in a designated spot. It was majorly fulfilling. I got to praise her a couple times when it actually happened correctly, but I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up all the spots on the carpet where it happened incorrectly. That was great, too.

Night three in the guest room provided a little more sleep for both of us, as she seems to be getting more comfortable in her new surroundings. Maybe I’ll get to sleep in my own bed tonight? Wouldn’t that be cool.

As for today, the only thing I’ve managed to do between puppy training is write this, and I have to stop now, because it’s time to go potty again.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll publish that third book when the dog is two or three years old.

Puppies are fun. You should totally get one.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Have Plunger, Will Educate

There are a lot of things they don’t tell you before you have kids of your own. That’s because “they” are your parents and they want to become grandparents, and they know that won’t happen if they tell you everything.

Last year at almost this exact date I wrote about one of my sons (who shall remain nameless in this, to keep his future dating prospects alive) and his questionable toilet-using skills. At the time last year I was concerned about our water bill, because I sat on the couch one night and counted his flushes. I intervened after flush number twenty-six (I am not making that up) and questioned him on why he felt the need simultaneously deplete my wallet of money while depleting the state of California of one of its most precious and currently scarce resources; my TV time. No… water.

His answer was that he was trying not to clog the toilet by going with the wipe/flush/wipe/flush/wipe/flush technique. My next question was the very obvious, “You mean to tell me you have wiped your butt twenty-six times?”

Forget the water bill; my toilet paper bill just eclipsed the mortgage. It was then that I told him we would obviously need to go over wiping techniques, but we’d take care of that in the morning.

Apparently I forgot to follow up on that whole toilet paper usage/wiping technique conversation, because it’s a year later and I’ve been getting a lot of, “Dad, the toilet’s clogged again,” this past month. It’s been happening so much I thought about starting to keep my plunger in a holster on my hip, but that would be gross. And it would make it harder to get in and out of the car.

The other day when I was responding to a clog the situation became a little clearer. There, floating in the bowl, was what can only be described as a giant toilet paper ball. My bathroom-challenged son has apparently been taking a tremendous amount of paper off the roll for each wipe, and rolling it up in a tight sphere the size of a regulation baseball, much like you would do if you were wrapping twine into a ball, only presumably a lot more comfortable to wipe your butt with.

I worked my plunger magic and then went to talk with him.

“Dude, you’ve got to stop making balls out of the toilet paper by wrapping it around itself a hundred times. That’s what’s clogging the toilet. Just take a little off the roll and wad it up.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean what do I mean?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just wad it up. It makes the same shape, but uses a lot less paper.”

“I’ve always wrapped it. Mommy told me to wrap it all the way around my hand, but I don’t get that, either. That’s just weird.”

“You’re right, that is weird. Don’t do that. Just wad it up instead.”

“I don’t get it.”

(sigh) “OK, I’ll show you next time.”

“Next time you poop?”

“No. Next time you poop. I’m not the one clogging up the toilet.”

It never occurred to me to have any formal toilet paper training sessions. I was just assuming they were paying attention when we were wiping their butts for them at the start of potty training. I mean, come on, it’s right there in the name, kid. Potty training. Pay attention.

Maybe we should have the whole family attend the new training session. That way mommy can be there to explain this wrap it around your hand thing. That seems problematic at best.

Proper butt wiping technique seminars and differing viewpoint discussion panels - this is the kind of thing “they” don’t tell you before you have kids. In retrospect, it was wise of the grandparents to omit the “crying baby throwing up on you at two in the morning” thing, and the “non-crying seven-year-old throwing up on you at two in the afternoon” thing. We may never have had kids. But I wish they would have mentioned this. I could have saved thousands of dollars on water and toilet paper.

I wonder what else they left out?

Excuse me; I have to go call my mom.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2015 Marc Schmatjen

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Sleep-peeing

There are probably a ton of helpful books on potty training kids. I’m just assuming this, because I haven’t read any of them. My wife may have read some of them, but I have a more wild west, seat-of-my-pants parenting style where I don’t seek out too much expert advice. It makes it more interesting that way.

Without having read or even seen any of the potty training manuals out there, I can assure you that not one of them has ever offered any helpful advice on sleep-peeing. Now, I’m not talking about peeing in the bed while sleeping. That can be handled with rubber sheets, some wipes, dry jammies, and a washing machine. I’m talking about the dreaded combination of sleepwalking and peeing.

Son Number One is the only one of our three boys that sleep-pees, but believe me, one is enough. My wife and I first noticed this unbecoming behavior a few years ago when he was six. After bedtime, we were downstairs and heard the very familiar – especially to guys – pee hitting the ground noise. I went to investigate and found Son Number One standing at the top of the stairs, adjusting his pajama pants. I asked him what he was doing, and he didn’t answer me. He just turned and walked back into his bedroom. Puzzled, I walked up the stairs and stepped in a puddle on the third stair from the top. This was our first experience with sleep-peeing, so we were a little skeptical and confused, but all the evidence pointed to the fact that our son had just gotten out of bed and peed down the stairs. When I went into their room to question him, he was under the covers, snoring.

Any doubts my wife and I may have had about what actually happened that night were answered a few weeks later when I heard the same noise while I was upstairs, and came out into the hallway to investigate. This time, he hadn’t even made it out of the room. He had simply opened the door, and was standing in the doorway, peeing into the hall. I walked over to him, straddled my legs wide and bent down to his eye level, six inches from his face, and asked, “Whatcha doin’ buddy?” while he peed onto the carpet between my legs. He never said a word. He just stared at me blankly, finished up, shook it off, tucked it back into his jammies, and got back in bed. Totally sleepwalking. Totally peeing on the carpet.

Over the last few years, since we have become aware of the issue, we have decided that Son Number One probably never actually fully wakes up to go pee, but he gets to the toilet 95% of the time, since the bathroom is right next to his bedroom, and he’s on familiar turf. Out the door, two right turns, through the door, toilet is on the right at the end of the bathroom by the tub. Whether or not he empties his bladder entirely into the toilet is another matter.

For a little while prior to this revelation about our son’s strange nighttime urination choices, I had suspected their toilet needed repairs. I kept finding puddles of what could only be pee on the floor around the base of the toilet in their bathroom. I assumed the wax ring under the toilet had gone bad, and the toilet was leaking. I overlooked the now obvious other possibility that one of them was peeing on or near the toilet instead of in the toilet.

Actually, the wet bathroom floor is not solely a nocturnal consciousness issue. Number One has pretty good aim with number one when he’s awake, but the other two boys are wild cards. Son Number Two is constantly in a hurry, and Son Number Three combines a lack of coordination with a propensity to go no-handed. I am trying to instill the belief in them that “on and around the toilet” is not the same as “in the toilet.” I don’t think I’m making any headway.

Since Son Number One is on familiar ground at home, the sleep-peeing usually occurs where it is supposed to, since the bathroom is always right where it’s supposed to be. We have to be on our toes when we travel, though.

“Sorry about our son peeing in your closet. Urine comes out of suede, right?”

Sleepwalking is a strange thing. His eyes are open, and he navigates around obstacles like he’s awake, only a little wobbly, like he’s been drinking beer or cough syrup. He appears to simply be sleepy, but in reality, his brain has only powered up the walk-around functions. The good decision making part of the brain is still out cold. His bladder is the only thing that triggers the events, so unfortunately, we don’t have any cute sleepwalking stories about him drawing a picture or rearranging the furniture. They all end in pee.

The key is the lack of conversation. If you see him out of bed and walking around and he won’t answer you when you say his name, you’d better start moving, because he’s about to pee in the kitchen pantry. The potty training manuals won’t be any help with this one, because there isn’t anything you can do to prevent it. You just have to hope he grows out of it, and resign yourself to the fact that you won’t own nice carpet until he leaves for college. That, and eliminate asparagus from his diet.

I have to go now. I just heard the bathroom door, but no toilet noises. It’s more of a hollow sound… I think he just peed in the tub.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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Mostly Proud Father

I had a very almost awesome, mostly exciting experience as a father the other night that left me half beaming with pride.

Son Number One, the oldest of the three, is seven years old. He’s on a seven and eight-year-old baseball team this year, and he is most assuredly in over his head. He is on the young side of the roster in the first place, but add to that the fact that he could care less if he is any good at baseball, and you have a kid who should really still be playing with the six-year-olds. He enjoys playing for the most part, but the internal drive and fire to be the best player he can be is completely missing. He strikes out, and runs back to the dugout with a smile on his face, just as happy as can be.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not the kind of dad that needs his kids to be all-stars. In fact, I have a “better living through mediocrity” philosophy when it comes to kids’ sports. I end up with a lot more free time if they stay middle of the road, athletically speaking. When you have an all-star, all of a sudden every single one of your weekends is spoken for with one tournament of champions or another. To that, I say no thanks.

That being said, I would like my eldest boy to be slightly more into the game of baseball than he seems to be. It doesn’t seem to faze him in the slightest that almost every other kid on his team can hit, field, and throw better than he can. He’s still having fun, though, and that’s what counts in my book.

So, anyway, the other night he had the game of his life. His usual M.O. at the plate is to swing at the first three pitches, no matter what they look like. Also, when he swings at them, he makes sure that the ball is already in the catcher’s mitt before starting the bat around. It makes for a pretty entertaining at-bat when the kid pitching bounces it in the dirt twice before it crosses the plate, the catcher loses it between his legs and is scrambling for the ball behind him, and then the batter swings. We’re having him tested for near-sightedness, far-sightedness, and blindness.

His first at-bat went as per usual. Three bad pitches, three late swings, and one happy kid running back to the bench. On his second at-bat, however, it was time for the coach to be pitching, so he got some balls that actually came across the plate. Out of nowhere, the planets aligned, the stars crossed, the bat started moving at the right time, and Son Number One ripped one up the middle past the second baseman for a single that moved his runner from first to third. Standing there on first base, beaming proudly at me, was the first glimmer I had seen all season of an honest-to-goodness baseball player. I was beaming back at him from the stands just as proud as I could possibly be. I was glowing.

It didn’t last long.

In the middle of the next kid’s at-bat, my superstar future Cal Ripken was not poised with one foot on the bag, stretched out and ready to run to second base. He was, instead, standing with both feet in the middle of the bag, facing away from second base, looking alternately at me and his base coach, holding his groin with both hands, hopping up and down, and generally giving us the universal “I’ve gotta pee really bad!” signals. When I suggested from the stands that he might want to hold it, his pained expression was replaced with a look of abject terror that immediately caused his base coach to call a pinch runner out of the dugout. Off went Son Number One like a rocket, straight off the field, through the dugout, and heading for the restrooms, abandoning what might have very well been his one base running opportunity of the year. I hung my head, and climbed out of the stands to follow him to the potty.

He was in the door to one of the restrooms well ahead of me, and when I opened the door to follow him, I was prepared to give a rather stern talking to about holding it next time in the middle of the game to a boy with his pants around his ankles, peeing into a toilet. What I found, however, was a heartbroken little boy, crying next to the potty, still fully clothed. He hadn’t made it in time. My seven-year-old had peed his pants. My heart melted, and I immediately switched to consoling dad mode. He was embarrassed, and terrified that everyone would know.

While I worked on stopping the tears and calming him down, I pieced together what had happened. As it turns out, the required athletic cup can backfire on this age group. While it is meant to be a protective device, it very much limits the wearer’s ability to “squeeze it off” in a pee emergency. Live and learn.

At the beginning of the year when we received my son’s uniform, I took one look at the pants and said to my wife, “You’re kidding, right?” White pants with red pin stripes, combined with red socks, navy blue jerseys, and black hats. They sort of look like the miniature Harlem Globetrotters of baseball. That night, however, I was thrilled with the white pants. After an initial examination of the damp young man, I was very happy to report to him that it was impossible to tell that his pants were wet. He would have to live with the fact that his underwear was squishy, but the general public would never know anything was amiss. The white pants had saved the day. We wiped off the tears, put a smile on our faces, and raced back to the field.

Some kid on the other team had made an unassisted triple play at third base right about the time that we had hit the restroom, so Son Number One’s entire team had already taken the field, and they were yelling for him to hurry up. Due to his late arrival, he was placed at the pitcher’s mound next to the coach instead of his usual spot in left field. Besides the fact that he ran out to the mound with his feet spread wide apart, waddle-running like his pants were wet, you never would have been able to tell his pants were wet. Crisis averted!

I had gone from super-proud and excited to less-than-thrilled and annoyed to empathetic and consoling to relieved and happy in the span of two minutes. As I sat back down in the stands, I was physically tired from all the emotions. I had barely caught my breath when I was back up on my feet, cheering wildly and beaming with pride again. For the second time that night the planets and stars all fell into place. The batter hit a dribbling ground ball back at the mound. Son Number One charged the ball, fielded it effortlessly, and pivoting on his right foot, threw a rifle-shot to first base to get the batter out by half a step. I have never seen him throw a ball that fast or that accurately. I was glowing once again.

The game ended shortly after that, and I bought him a celebratory Icee at the snack bar. We had a serious discussion about remembering to go potty before the game from now on, and more excited talk from his proud father about his hit and his play at the mound. We also decided that since it was a late game and his mom was home with his younger brothers, we would tell her all about his highlights, but keep the part about the pee to ourselves. We figured it was guy stuff, and since no one else knew, she didn’t need to know either. So if you happen to see him, just high-five him for the hit and the out. You don’t know anything about any accident.

True to form for my not-so-sports-oriented seven-year-old, however, if you ask him about that game today, he’ll probably remember only one thing. The Icee.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2012 Marc Schmatjen

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The Spica Cast, Part IV

Son Number Three was freed from his personal fiberglass prison on the day before Thanksgiving. It was a very liberating day for all of us. He was cut loose from his huge Spica body cast, and after an entire box of baby wipes and two baths, we were finally free of his tremendously powerful ammonia smell.  

While we are thrilled to finally be free of the stench, we have been left with another rather unpleasant side effect: Diapers. It’s our own fault really. We all got lazy.

At the time he broke his leg, our three-year-old was potty trained, but semi-unreliable. He was wearing big boy underwear during the days, and he always alerted us to when he needed to visit the potty, but his bodily function recognition system was still being debugged. He would announce that he needed to go pee, and then proceed to poop. He would say that he needed to poop, then get to the toilet, pee, and tell us “there is no poop in my butt.” To complicate things, he also got it right half the time, so you couldn’t just go with the opposite and be confident. Needless to say, after a few mix-ups while standing in front of the potty, he was a permanent sitter.

When he came home from the hospital in the crazy immobilizing uni-cast, he was no longer able to sit on the potty. To compensate for that, the hospital sent him home with a plastic wide-mouth bottle for peeing, and a plastic bed pan for pooping. Neither one was universal, and it was very difficult to get him positioned to try and use both the bottle and the bed pan at once. Given his lack of reliability on identifying what might be leaving his body at any given moment, you can see our dilemma. It was like a very high stakes game of whack-a-mole. You’d best be quick.

Once the cast went on, he was in diapers anyway, because the last thing you want with a Spica cast is an accident that you can’t get rid of for 6-1/2 weeks. We tried our best to use the bed pan and pee bottle for the first few days, but then we got lazy and tired of trying our best. And tired of cleaning pee out of the carpet. And out of our shirts.

By the end of Son Number Three’s first week in the cast, we were having this conversation:

“I have to pee.”

“OK. Go for it.”

“Are you coming?”

“No, buddy. Just pee in your diaper. I’ll change you right after you’re done so you won’t have a wet diaper.”

“OK.”

By the end of the second week, he was getting lazy and no longer giving us advanced notice, and we were all getting more comfortable with wet diapers:

“I peed in my diaper.”

“OK, buddy.”

“Are you coming?”

“Not right now. I’ll change you after your show is over.”

“OK.”

By the end of the third week, a total family laziness had set in and we were getting no notices at all:

 “Hey, buddy, it’s dinner time. Do you have a wet diaper?”

“No.”

“Let’s check anyway… Holy cow, dude. This diaper is full.”

“Oh, yeah. I peed.”

“When did you pee?”

“At lunch.”

So now, here we are, two weeks after he was liberated from Spica cast confinement, and he is still in diapers and still not giving us any notice. We seem to be back at square one, potty training-wise, and it looks like we’re going to have to go through the whole ordeal again. We haven’t started yet, though.

Why, you ask? Well, there’s another problem. He hasn’t started to walk yet, either.

I contend it has to do with an overall laziness that has taken over every aspect of his life, but my wife keeps telling me it’s all part of the healing process. She also keeps pointing out how readily and vigorously he scoots himself around the house on his butt. She has a point. He does scoot an awful lot in situations where walking would be easier. I still think he’s milking it a little, but in any case, the point is, he hasn’t started back to walking yet.

What does that have to do with re-potty training, you ask? Let me give you a visual to help answer that question.

Imagine a three-year-old boy, who can’t walk because of a bad leg, who wants to sit in a chair. How does he do it? Well, first, he scoots on his butt over to the chair, straddling the chair with his legs. Then he hugs the leg of the chair, putting his face on the top part of the chair leg to gain some amount of leverage. He then proceeds to use his arms and face to grapple and shimmy his way up the leg of the chair, using his good leg to push and slide head-first onto the seat, until his belly is square in the middle of the chair. He then performs a complicated flip-scoot-twist-and-sit maneuver to get into an upright sitting position on the chair.

Now imagine that with a toilet.

We’re going to go ahead and just roll with the diapers a little longer until he starts to walk again.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen

Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?

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Potty Training Out Loud

My wife and I have three boys. Boy Number Three just turned three years old and is the last one in diapers. We started potty training him last week. I don’t know if you have ever potty trained anyone or anything, but let me tell you, it can get exciting for a whole bunch of different reasons.

For starters, my wife and I are excited at the prospect of being done with diapers for good. We’ve been knee-deep in them for six and a half years now, and we can finally see the light at the end of the dark and stinky tunnel. It’s such a wonderful thought that we almost dare not speak it, for fear of jinxing it.

No more expensive diapers! No more expensive wipes. No more disgusting diapers! No more used wipes. No more storing used diapers and their nefarious contents in my garage. No more storing eight-foot-square Costco-sized cases of diapers in my garage. No more packages of diapers and wipes falling out at me from every closet in the house.

No more questioning Boy Number Three about the current situation in his pants. No more needing to check the validity of said boy's answer. (He has never been very reliable.) Never again will we need to bend down and go sniffing around his butt like an ill-mannered hound dog. No more stomach-over-the-forearm, pull-up-the-back-of-the-shorts visual poop checks. We are mere days away from becoming a civilized family that fully utilizes their indoor plumbing. It’s all very exciting!

Then there is the other kind of excitement. Part of the deal with potty training involves gambling. This is when you put the child in “big boy underwear” and let them roam freely around the house, while you chew your nails and inquire with them every 10-12 seconds if they need to go sit on the potty. About every half-hour or so, your nerves are so frayed that you just go set them on the potty as a preemptive measure.

At our house, if you pee on the potty, you get five M&Ms. For our kids who don’t get candy on a regular basis, that tends to be a big deal. If you poop on the potty, you get a whole bunch of M&Ms. The amount varies depending on how excited the parent is that they just dodged a bullet. I give him the whole bag.

Most of the time, however, you end up cleaning up a mess instead of handing out congratulatory candy-coated chocolate. With Boy Number Three, this has been quite an ordeal. Not due to the messes so much as the raw emotion involved. You see, Number Three is either not very smart, or a super-genius. I haven’t decided which yet. He either can’t seem to get his terminology right, or he is so brilliant that at age three, he has already mastered reverse psychology and corporate level negotiating techniques. Allow me to explain.

He keeps mixing up the terms “poop” and “pee.” He will be in big boy underwear upstairs and yell down in a sad voice that he is poopy. You run upstairs in a panic, expecting the worst, only to find that he has peed, but not pooped.

Because you were mentally prepared for the worst, after you realize the real situation at hand, you are actually happy to only be cleaning up pee. You are so happy not to be scrubbing something far worse out of the upholstery that you almost thank him for peeing in his pants and on the couch. Go figure.

Like I said, he may be the smartest kid on the planet, or he may just be really bad with terminology. I’m leaning toward the latter, because I can’t really see any upside to peeing all over yourself and missing out on free candy, and a genius would have probably figured that out by now, three years old or not.

Anyway, we’re in the midst of it all, and we’re excited that we’re so close to being diaperless. My wife is so excited about the prospect of a carefree life without poopy pants that she temporarily lost her mind the other day, and inadvertently gave me the opportunity to discover just how excited I really am about living a diaper-free life.

I was at the office and my cell phone rang. It was my wife, who in an excited voice announced that Number Three had just pooped on the potty, and then immediately put Number Three on the phone. She didn't ask me where I was or if I could talk, she just put him on the phone. Then, my three-year-old tells me he just pooped on the potty, FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME IN HIS WHOLE LIFE.

I am standing in the middle of my office. My co-workers are all around, and my son is breathlessly awaiting my response. I need to make a very quick decision. On the one hand, I obviously need to be very excited and congratulatory. This is a huge deal and needs to be treated that way. We need to joyously convey the message to him that we are very happy and he has done a great thing.

On the other hand, I am at the office, and would like to maintain a certain level of decorum. I am standing next to the boss’s office. There are people on the phone with customers. On the whole, I would like to keep things with my colleagues on a professional level, and joyous congratulations about pooping aren’t exactly professional.

I learned something about myself that day. I realized, almost instantly, that my distain for dirty diapers greatly outweighs my desire to remain professional.

"GREAT JOB POOPING ON THE POTTY, BUDDY!" I yelled into the phone.

Work is a little weird now, but I don’t care. I really want to be done with diapers!

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2011 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh, Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!

My Mind is in the Toilet

Now that I am a dad, I spend a lot of time thinking about toilets. They seem to have become a central theme in my life. I have a four-year-old and a two-and-a-half-year-old in potty training and that inevitably leads to a lot of concern over commodes.

All activities away from the home now have a toilet element in the planning that sometimes eclipses all other decision making.
- We need to try and go potty before we leave.
- Was it successful?
- Yes, OK we’re good for a while.
- No? OK, when was the last time we went potty?
- Will that affect our route to the mall?
- We’d better try again at the mall before we do anything else.
- Where are the toilets in the mall and how will that affect where I park?
- What did we come to the mall for? Was it toilets? I forget.

On road trips I used to stop only when I needed gas and I would choose a gas station based on the price of unleaded. Now I stop at regularly scheduled potty intervals and I choose gas stations on a wide variety of criteria, all having to do with the toilet.
- Does this place have a potty?
- If so, is it in a safe, well lit location?
- If so, does the exterior suggest that the interior will be clean?
- If so, based on past restroom/gas station chain experience, is this place likely to have a diaper changing station (for the 6-month-old)?
- If so, does this place also sell gas?
- If so, great! What’s that? The gas is sixty-seven dollars per gallon more than the dimly-lit, dirty-looking place across the street? Oh, well!

Once I have picked a bathroom successfully, and we’re going in, I now find myself paying much more attention to the lower half of the room. This is due to the proximity of my boys to the floor and their propensity for picking anything up. I’m like a Secret Service agent clearing a hotel’s back corridor just seconds ahead of POTUS.
“Yes, I’m in and we have one unsavory character at urinal three, but otherwise clear of civilians, over.”
“Wait, we’ve got something on the floor. Hang on.”
“No, it’s OK, it’s just an empty McDonald’s bag.”
“We’re clear people, let’s bring em’ in.”

And what is the story with public parks that don’t have toilets? The people that build parks know that children will come there, right? They put in nineteen acres of Kentucky bluegrass and keep it mowed and trimmed neater than the fairways at Augusta, but they can’t afford to maintain one hole in the ground? What am I paying taxes for? I’m not even asking for toilet paper! I’ll bring my own. I always have wipes. Just provide a hole and a seat. This is an especially troubling phenomenon in the newer subdivisions without any mature trees. You never really know how you’re going to react in a crisis situation until you have a kid dancing around at your heels saying “Daddy, daddy I really need to poop” and you scan the area to discover you are standing on what looks like the surface of the moon. “Hold it” is not a fool-proof option for a three-year-old when you’re fifteen minutes from home. Sometimes, you just have to hold your kid over a trash can.

And speaking of wipes, how did we ever live our pre-parental lives without them? I can’t even remember my life before having children, but I know for a fact it must have been horribly inconvenient without constantly having access to baby wipes. Now granted, before I had kids I probably had fewer messes to deal with every day, but let’s face it, I was a bachelor. I wasn’t exactly Mr. Clean. (Besides the fact that there is no possible way I could pull off the bald-with-a-gold-hoop-earring quasi pirate look, I wasn’t all that clean either.) What did I use to clean up spills? Or shine my shoes? Or blow my nose, clean my sunglasses, dust the house, wash my hands, clean the dashboard, wash my feet, wipe down the kitchen, wash my face, check my oil, or polish the silverware? I probably just used my shirt like my kids do.

As if off-site bathrooms weren’t enough of a concern, the bathrooms at home aren’t exactly free from troubles either. Sure the kids have easy access to them, but sometimes, that’s the problem. Since we’ve had children, I have very rarely used my toilet by myself. Some little one either wants to come in to watch how it’s done, or just needs to be in there with me to talk about what’s going on. If I lock the door, that often leads to a lot of knocking, banging, or crying about not being able to get in.

Before I had kids I never gave one thought to the bathrooms at work. Now I cherish them. Using the bathroom at work is the only time I ever have any privacy on the toilet anymore. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will have very little privacy in my own bathroom ever again, unless I can hold out until nine or ten at night when I’m relatively sure there won’t be any more boys boomeranging out of bed to use the potty. But even after nine it’s a crapshoot (so to speak). There is always the off chance that someone will still get up because “There’s another poop in there,” or “Whoops, I forgot to pee.”

Go use the toilet at the park kid. Here’s some wipes.

See you soon,
-Smidge


Copyright © 2008 Marc Schmatjen


Have kids? Have grandkids? Need a great gift?
Go to www.smidgebooks.com today and get your copy of “My Giraffe Makes Me Laugh,” Marc’s exciting new children’s book. Get ready for a wild rhyming adventure!