Toiletries

Before anyone becomes a parent, they receive all sorts of advice, warnings, parenting and disciplining tips, and good wishes. As great as this is, I wish someone would have told me how much of my life would involve cleaning up, being covered in, talking about, lamenting over, and being completely embarrassed by poop and pee. I wish there was a more graceful way to say it, so Jeffry-a man who grew upset when I told Wesley what farts were and insisted we use "toot" instead-has suggested euphemizing the words. For the rest of this blog entry, pee will be referred to as "tinkle" and poop as "squeegee". You're welcome, Jeffry. Moving on...from the newborn that noisily explodes its pants during the prayer in relief society to the messes involved with potty-training, tinkle and squeegee are a constant of every young parent's life. Here are just a few charming anecdotes from recent months.

We attempted-and failed miserably-to potty-train Evan over the Christmas break. Evan's stubbornness is monumental; I pray for strength to combat it the next time that I try. Because of our optimistic attempt, we had toilet-toppers in the bathrooms (little snap-on toilet seats that make it easier for the youngins to perch). One morning I heard Wesley screaming downstairs. As he tends to not have a "quiet voice" (a fact brought to my attention by the primary president), I took no notice until he came stumbling upstairs, with his head stuck in Evan's toilet seat. The look of misery on his face says it all.

During sacrament meeting last week, Evan set the hymnals on the seat, lifted up the covers to rest against the back of the pew, and proceeded to climb onto them and pretend to use those hymnals as "toilets". Because I was reverently pondering the sacrament, I took little notice until Evan climbed off and informed me that he was going squeegee.

As I was receiving a spiritual message from my visiting teachers a few months ago, unbeknownst to me, Wesley was downstairs with my visiting teacher's two little girls, tinkling into a Legos bucket. Traumatized, the girls came up and told their mom that "a little boy down there tinkled into a bucket in front of us." I disdainfully dismissed their claim, saying he had never done anything of the sort before. Later however, I discovered the freshly christened bucket, and Wesley's answer to why he had done such a thing was, "I wanted to show them." This proves that God has a sense of humor, because in my pre-child days, when my attitude towards mothering was both haughty and naive, I was horrified when one of Jeffry's advisor's little boys tinkled on a tree right in front of a group of us at a party. To Jeffry later, I chastised the kid's parents, labeling them as softies with no discipline of their children. And there you have it. My judgment day has come. Not surprisingly, my visiting teacher no longer brings her little girls over.

And, as I change one more dirty diaper that Evan kicks onto me, covering me with squeegee, I look forward to the day when I can wash my hands of this matter, once and for all.