Potty Training and Other Records for Posterity

Disclaimer: If you're eating or easily grossed out...you may want to just skip through your reader to a different posting.

Just thought I'd warn you up front.

Are you sure you want to go through with this? I will be discussing potty training issues.

I'm warning you, peeps...if you're squeamish, you do NOT want to read this one. Just sayin'

Here goes...

...Playdough turquoise is not a color you should ever see in diapers.

Can somebody please tell me how a scant cup of dry generic fruit loops cereal given out in baggies to tots watching a Veggie Tale's movie could produce bright, technicolor poo?

Freakiest. thing. ever.

It's horrible how much food coloring is in that cereal.

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Never allow your almost potty-trained 3 year old son to go potty by himself in the bathroom.

Especially when he doesn't understand the whole, "Call mama when you need me to help [wipe] you" like he should.

Because he will do his business and get off the pot all by himself (so proudly), except that in the process, he will smear his little behind all over the seat.

Then he will apparently sit on the edge of the bathtub contemplating what to do about the mess he just left on the toilet seat.

It is supposed that he will then determine that shutting the lid of the toilet seat will hide all evidence there, but that in doing so, he will turn around and notice what he left on the edge of the bathtub.

Knowing he is going to be in big trouble, he will then sit on the toilet lid for a few moments to figure out how to hide what was left on the tub, at which point he will ostensibly climb up on the counter and open the bathroom mirror where he remembered that there was some white Gol.d Bon.d Med.icated Pow.der that might hide the mess on the tub.

Only he will decide instead to fill his socks with it, because he saw big brother do this once for a mild case of athlete's foot and he is just sure he's missing out on some important rite of passage...something that will truly make him that big boy that he longs to be.

And he will do this all in that minute before you realize he's been quiet for too long.

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The next day, you will find need of his shoes, only he will not remember where he last had them on, and of course, neither will you.

You will go on an exhaustive search of the entire house trying to find them, and will only happen across them when you enter the main bathroom for the morning laundry, when you spot one of the pair beside the toilet of all places.

Further searching will finally yield the other shoe sitting immersed in an old diaper wipes container beneath the bathroom sink, fomenting in some unidentifiable and gaggingly stinky substance of unknown origins that you were fearful of flushing lest it lead to some septic problem of major proportions.

In the end it will be determined that it's just not worth it to try and salvage the shoes because, unlike your grandma's War era experience of having to wash her son's shoes off after he stepped in a railway spittoon, you are not rushing with four children to catch a train or worried about him being shoeless because of rationing.

And you breathe a prayer of thanks that you have the rescources available right then to buy a new pair of shoes.

And the ability to lock the doors on the bathrooms at all times to avoid such hassles in the future.

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Do not allow your 12 year old son to have more than one bean burrito in one sitting, especially without first taking a dose of Beano, because he will become just like Visa (everywhere you need to be)...stinking up the air you are trying to breathe, preferring the closed in and confined spaces like cars and elevators at places like IKEA.

Then he will catch you unaware, passing gas in the aisle at the grocery store and then disappear so that other shoppers believe that it was YOU who was the guilty party, and will laugh his head off about it when you tell him how rude and inconsiderate such behavior was.

:: :: :: ::

Your almost potty-trained toddler son will become obsessed with this new aspect of daily life (going potty), and looking forward to the day when he finally gets to wear his Thomas the Train underwear.

He will be so proud of himself for 'going' to the bathroom on the toilet all by himself.

However, he will eventually go to the bathroom all by himself and not tell you.

He will quietly go about his business, first pulling down, and later pulling up his own pull-up and pants.

He will even wash his hands.

You will congratulate him on being such a big boy.

And you won't know anything was amiss until he grows uncomfortable from not having, ahem, wiped himself, and will loudly voice his complaint in the only way he knows to explain while sitting at the Thanksgiving Supper at church, whining, "I have a waa-a-a-ash on my butt, mom".

Niiice.