If My son were Magellan discovering the New World, We’d all be shopping at Wal Mart somewhere south of Ecuador.
POTTY TRAINING: It’s a biological necessity that binds humanity from an early age. Regardless of race or creed or socioeconomic station in life, Potty Training is one of the early universal stumbling blocks that each of us must clear in order to gain acceptance on the most fundamental level of societal steps.
If potty training were a mathematical equation, it would be infinity divided by one. A figure so complex, yet so simple, that every human can, and must answer it. It is, in its purest form, an equation of necessity.
If potty training were a molecular compound, it would be hydrogen and oxygen dancing under a waterfall of blissful togetherness.
If potty training were political, it would be a ballot box stuffed with the freedom to choose to stand or sit.
In every culture; from the Great Wall to the Great Pyramids, potty training is a celebrated plateau of social development. Along with an opposable thumb, and ability to reason, it separates us from the animals. For youngsters, it’s a right of passage that brings feelings of self worth and accomplishment.
For some parents, potty training is a chance to open the garbage can for the first time in three years, without being bludgeoned by noxious fumes of sickly pudding that have been fermenting in a sour sauce of poisonous vinegar.
Potty Training can be an economical windfall where the plastic absorbency of Pampers and Huggies, which have kept your child and your wallet dry for years, can finally be passed over in the super market.
During the day, Zander is pretty good about the toilet. But you know how boys can be. Bad aim, a wobble here, an errant stream there, and suddenly the back of the tank, the floor, the bathroom scale, all need a good wiping down.
But poo poo is another story. Sometimes, I wish Zander still used a diaper. It was easier to just wipe him down, towel him off, dispose of the nastiness and wrap him up in a brand new pair of Huggies.
Now that he’s five, he’s starting to wipe himself. It would be less disastrous if we let him cook Thanksgiving turkey with an acetylene torch.
First he grabs so much toilet paper, you wonder whether it will even flush. I’ve caught him rolling half the roll around his arm. On a good visit, he looks like he’s trying to wipe himself with a three foot baton of cotton candy.
If wiping were an Olympic event, Zander would be a Rhythmic Gymnast prancing around the mat with a forty foot trail of pink Charmin, doing rolls and tumbling insouciantly. I’m sure the Russian judges would give him a Zero for artistry, but applaud his creativity for best use of toilet paper in a world sanctioned competition.
Zander definitely has his own style. First he bends forward at the waist clutching his absorbent high over his head. While he struggles to draw breath into his compressed lungs, he awkwardly reaches back with his clump of tissue. Then, with the adroit skills of a Hill Billy slurping moonshine through a stalk of grass, he begins dabbing at the soiled area. It’s like letting an orangutan do bypass surgery. He flails wildly at his rear end, like a pink tailed cockatoo strutting for a mate. He slides around on the toilet seat like a buttered gyroscope on a submerging submarine.
Not having mastered the art of folding toilet tissue, the second and third wipes usually result in a dark stain up the side of one of his little butt cheeks. Suddenly he’s Salvador Dali painting on a surreal canvas of skin. His zestful and misguided brush strokes quickly dot the flesh tone landscape of his butt cheek, lower thigh and back, with brown rows of melting clocks. Once my little golden child, he has suddenly transformed himself into an EPA super fund site.
“Daddy, did I get it all?,” he asks innocently.
“Sure, little buddy,” I’ll say, while I begin back tracking over the trouble spots. “You’re doing great, and you’re really trying.”
You don’t won’t to discourage young potty trainers. Bad wiping can lead to a stigmatized adult who ends up climbing a clock tower with a rifle. We don’t need any more of that in America. Maybe the problem with postal carriers is bad wiping habits. Some one should do a study on that. Through rain and sleet and dirty underwear….
Zander’s problem is, he wipes the way he writes; big, and often all over the place. If Zander rode his bike like he wipes his butt, he’d lean awkwardly to the left, stagger for a moment, then smash into a parked car.
Dana always warns me not to discourage the little guy, because he’s trying so hard to cross this early threshold. But I’ll tell you, it’s hard not to laugh as he folds himself into a toilet accordion reaching back, wiping aimlessly with a mop sized hand full of dirty toilet tissue. He looks like the Iraqi army, scared and shirtless and waving its collective white flags trying to surrender in the potty training desert of life.
“I did a good job didn’t I daddy?” His little face is red from contortion and straining to reach the middle of his back.
“Sure you did a good job,” I say. But what I’d like to say is: “If Patton had as much trouble finding the battle field as you do finding your butt crack, we’d all be driving Volkswagens saying Achtung each time we greeted each other.”
They say girls train much more quickly than boys. Well if that’s true, my two-year-old has yet to read that chapter. Kenzie is a recalcitrant toddler who knows it all and who fervently believes that diapers are fun and being changed by her parents is enjoyable.
In other words, DIAPERS ARE CONVENIENT AND TOILET TRAINING IS A WEAPON!
When asked to use the potty, Kenzie says; “I don’t think so daddy. I like my diaper, it’s my friend.” She callously tells us that she has no intentions of using the potty because, in her words, “It is cold and hard. My diapers are soft and warm.”
Dana says we can’t force her, and one day she’ll get tired of being soggy all the time, and she’ll ask to use the toilet. Until then, Kenzie, unfortunately is holding all the cards.
I’m no Doctor Spock, but I say, lose the diaper, give her some panty’s and let’s move on with life.
Fat chance!! Like a militant militia member holed up in the woods, Kenzie often rips off her own wet diaper, sometimes waving it over her head like a cowboy roping beef. She’s not big, but she’s a tigress, strong enough to lift her condensed neutron star full of urine. Then with a demonic glee reserved for last suppers on death row, she’ll toss the heavy sack against the floor. Like a wet roll of newspaper it splatters on the linoleum.
“Kenzie, are you throwing your diaper again,” Dana will holler not looking up from her book.
“No mommy, that was a monster,” Kenzie will say, her little butt pointing up in the air defiantly.
“Well that monster better not be naked,” Dana retorts quickly. “And your diaper better be put in the trash.”
That’s usually when I have to get involved. “What are you doing in there?”
“Nothing,” she says furtively.
As I grab the diaper out of her baby hand I feel gravity tug at my arm. The diaper is dense as a sack of wet spaghetti. Damn, I muse to myself, “This jelly filled incubator of urine is heavy.”
As much as I want my children to cross the potty training threshold of life, I will admit that diapers can be convenient.
Since Zander started using the bathroom, long car rides have become much more hectic.
“I’ve got to go pee pee,” comes the frantic holler from the back seat.
The words scratch my cerebellum like jagged glass ripping a hole in a leather couch. I stare up in the rear view mirror wide eyed and nervous.
“What do you mean, you have to go to the bathroom? You mean right now?, you have to go to the bathroom?”
With fear and pain on his scrunched face he replies; “Yes. Please stop, daddy. I have to go so bad.”
I look at Dana and she at me. Her eyes are drawn in and her mouth half a gape. I’m not sure why our child having to use the toilet while we’re doing seventy five miles an hour upsets us so, but it does.
In situations like this, no words are necessary. I stare out the front window looking for some sort of answer. It’s dark and a spitting drizzle sprinkles across the wind shield. There’s not a rest stop or restaurant in sight. The road is dark and a tiny, microscopic bladder continues to fill with urine on seats of soft Corinthian leather.
“Can you hang in there, little dude?,” I ask.
“No, it’s so full, I can’t hold it,” he whimpers from the darkness of the back seat.
I feel the knot tie tighter in my stomach as I scan the road ahead for relief.
How come children suddenly have to go to the bathroom? How does it just sneak up on them, without their knowledge. Don’t they feel the gradual building of pressure? Don’t they realize that fourteen ounces of Hawaiian Punch at the last rest stop is going to eventually exit sometime, somewhere?
While a thousand thoughts ramble through my mind, A mini-van pulls beside me in the fast lane. Inside I see a couple in the front seat and two small children in the back. Unlike my querulous crew, they are sleeping soundly.
“I bet those kids are wearing diapers,” I murmur to myself.
I look to Dana who has her hand supportively on Zander’s shoulder. She looks anxious as she gazes from me to the empty landscape ahead.
“What are you going to do?”
I don’t answer, but my mind is racing. I hear Zander’s painful whimper from behind me. I feel badly for my little guy, and I’m nervous that the leather seats are going to get a warm hosing off if I don’t hurry.
There’s really only one option, I think to myself. Pull over!
I look at the family in the van. The children are sleeping peacefully clutching their Sing and Snore Ernie dolls. As I look for the next available exit, I can’t help wondering if the sleeping van children have their asses submerged in a lake of soggy urine.
“I bet there’s a gallon of pee inside those jelly filled, plastic sacks wrapping their bottoms,” I blurt out.
“I think you better pull over,” Dana says as Zander begins to cry softly.
Yeah, I bet those diapers are filled, I think to myself, imagining what it would be like to be a dad driving a car at night without crying bladders full of anguish.
With no immediate exit in site, I imagine the construction of the diaper. Like a mighty battlefield of plastic where wetness and dryness compete for supremacy. On one side are the jelly balls. On the other is the urine. The two clash in the absorbent padded center like a thunder cloud tearing across a cotton sky. The jelly balls are relentlessly aggressive. Their strategy is predictable and effective. Like an angry platoon of wax-warriors, they attack, engaging each urine drop in hand to hand combat. Using a sleeper hold, the jelly balls envelop the droplets, isolating them from the rest of their attack force.
Then when the urine is rendered harmless, the jelly-troopers drag the moist invaders away from the youngster’s bare bottom.
Man what a concept. I wish I could surround my car with a diaper. I could go to sleep at a hundred miles an hour, secure in the knowledge that all harm and nasty road grime would be repelled and my vehicle would arrive safe and sound, if not a little heavier at the next rest stop.
I felt envious of the father I didn’t know in the van next to me. His face, illuminated by the dash board was at peace in the eerie green light. I watched as he sipped a cup of coffee and motored ahead into the darkness with a van full of controlled waste.
I exited off the highway onto a desolate stretch of campestral America. With flashers on, I pulled to the side of the road. I looked back at Zander who was turning red, he was squeezing his groin so hard. I felt bad for the little guy. Like the skin of a water balloon stretched to infinity, his face was puffed to the breaking point. I opened my door, and stepped into the soft mush. Gravel crunched under my feet as I walked to the back door.
I pulled open the door and was almost bolted over by a tiny white tornado. Before he stopped moving, Zander’s pants were down around his thighs and he was peeing. Like an artillery blast on a darkened battlefield, his pee flashed iridescently in the orange and white emergency blinkers strobing this quiet cul-de-sac of existence.
I could see Zander’s face returning to normal proportions as his little bladder emptied into the marshy field. “Thanks dad, I really had to go bad,” he said finishing up.
“No problem son,” I said putting my hand on his shoulder. “You did a good job holding it, till we could pull over.”
As he climbed back in the car, he looked at Kenzie fast asleep in her car seat. She was unaware of the panic any of us had just experienced. “I bet Kenzie has a big diaper full of pee pee,” Zander said playfully.
I laughed and looked at her resting, peaceful face. “I bet she does, little man, I bet she does.”
Toilet training is one hurdle parents face in the course of child rearing. And it all starts with that first merconium diaper when baby comes home still pumping out dark pasty poop the consistency of warm tar. Like a squid with tentacles covered in super glue, that first baby poop adheres to legs and cloth and wipes.
This first diaper change is when a new parent knows his or her life has irrevocably been altered. The carefree, capricious fervor of youth gives way to parental responsibilities, which include dirty thankless chores.
I remember when Zander first came home from the hospital. He was on the carpet, eyes clamped into scrunched fists of furry. His tiny baby hairs were standing on end as if he were hooked to an electric generator. His little chest was rapidly pulsing like a sack of possums. His screams were primal and mysterious. His little face red and angry. He was a tiny, hollering bag of flesh covered by a white diaper with Disney land characters that swam around his miniscule waist.
Dana was just back from the hospital. As she looked down upon her infant son, I could tell there was a bowling ball sized obstruction working its way through her stomach.
“What now?,” she was thinking. After all, this isn’t a chapter in ‘What to expect when you’re expecting’. This was suddenly REAL LIFE! Chapter one. Where all five-and-a-half pounds of thumping, pumping, new born son is obviously upset, and not doing a good job of letting us know why.
Dana was scared, a new mother standing on the precipice of indecision. After thirty six hours of labor, she was tired and sore. She wanted to sleep, but Zander’s needs suddenly consumed everything else. Like a diamond smuggler moving through customs, Dana nervously moved around baby Z.
“Does Zander have stinky pants?,” she asked. The question was moot, as a wave of soiled stench smeared the air around us.
“Unless a dead person is decomposing in his rectum, I’d say the answer is yes.”
Dana pulled at his over-sized diaper, somewhat afraid of the tiny little creature with the big vocal chords and tiny body. She tugged on the fasteners. The unmistakable sound of tearing plastic whined through the room. She slowly pulled away the diaper, revealing the evil within.
Dana’s face became a melting pot of flesh tones. Like heat waves floating off a scorching summer highway, I watched Dana’s expression through a hazy vapor that was rising slowly out of the boy’s pants.
I could only assume what I was looking at was human in origin, but it was so heinous, I half way expected NASA scientists clad in bubble suits to burst through the door and begin collecting stool samples.
The melted, piping hot liquid cheese clung to his chubby little thighs. A nasty viscous mess that had no beginning and no end. It was a murky swamp of desolation that sucked light into its vortex.
How could so much stink come out of a butt so small?, I thought to myself. Dana and I laughed that silent parental laugh as we embarked into the soiled never-regions that marked our first foray into toxic waste disposal.
Dana pulled out a CHUBB. A three inch, pre-moistened piece of cloth chemically designed to separate a baby’s bottom from the evil which quickly clings to it.
CHUBBS! What a fitting name for this particular product. It was like a chemical crowbar that literally pries the stink out of every crack and crevice.
Like a den mother on Prozac, Dana seemed a little lost. I jumped in, grabbing hold of Zander’s legs. Dana began “CHUBBING” away at Zander’s rear end.
She wiped repeatedly, searching for a sign of flesh, but the yellow matted custard ooze kept glopping on the CHUBB cloth. Zander’s distended scrotum swung in the breeze as we continued mopping the soupy refuse.
“We need a couple of those EPA environmental suits for this job!” I said flippantly.
Dana laughed as she dropped another saturated CHUBB into the waist bucket near the couch. I looked into the bucket tenuously. CHUBB refuse had solidified into a soiled yellow concrete. It had chemically fused together by theorems not yet explainable to mere man. The bucket of baby waste was heavy and dense. The light around the rim of the wasted bucket seemed to swirl like the spiral tentacles orbiting a gravity rich proton star imploding on itself. It was all so strangely scientific; a living, undulating bucket of protoplasm-poop that would grow beyond the confines of its container one night while we slept.
My mind raced wildly as I imagined a six foot tall yellow poop human standing above me in the middle of my bedroom. For whatever it was an odd creature that sneered like Edward G. Robinson without the cigar.
“AC, will you help me, please!” Dana’s hands were filled with slithering, slimy CHUBB juice. She pointed with her elbow for me to get another diaper out of econo-pack. A mountainous pile of soft foam rubber stacked 54 to a case like some kind of plastic sardine can.
“He’s going to use all these?,” I mused aloud.
Dana cast me an incredulous stare.
Zander was suddenly quiet. Like the calm that fills the room moments after the vacuum cleaner is turned off, Zander’s screams were sedated, replaced with baby coos and playful gasps. Dana walked to the kitchen to dispose of the badly beaten soiled diaper. She held the saturated plastic at arms length tilting her head away from it as she walked. Her face was squinting as if she was staring into the sun while walking barefoot across hot coals.
Baby waste disposal can be nasty business don’t you know?
With Dana out of the room, I moved over to the infant king. I picked him up under his tiny arm pits and held him high over my head. “What’s up little man?,”
He stared at me with a puzzled face. I could see his little mind working. Infant synapses super charging and overloading on too much quantum data. He eyes rolled around in his head as a mucousy river of saliva began slithering out of his mouth. It dribbled over his quivering lip, sliding toward the floor. Like frozen motor oil, the bile like goo, moved with a slow motion elasticity, as it elongated and stretched downward. It was hypnotic. I knew that I should wipe this string-like spittle from the boy’s face, but some how it was fascinating to me. I stood motionless and let the moment devour me.
This may be my epiphany, the moment that I knew I was a dad. Zander looked at me casually. He neither expected nor cared if I wiped the milky goo from his face. As if his stomach was a jack in the box in a bucket of butter milk, another viscous surge of drool oozed from Zander’s lips.
I was holding a baby horror movie in my arms. Zander was the scientist in the movie, The Fly. Like Jeff Goldbloom’s character, Zander pussed and oozed in some grotesque act of reverse peristalsis as his metamorphosis changed his physical being.
Suddenly, Dana reappeared. “What the hell’s going on?” Her question rang down on me like a hammer striking my thumb. Play stupid, I quickly thought to myself.
“What do you mean, like, you mean right now what’s going on?”
Dana rolled her eyes. With arms out stretched, she moved forward. “Give me that Child before you kill him.”
I handed her the boy. Her maternal power was too much to resist.
PANDA
And that was lesson number one. A soiled, stinky, foul lesson a parent will repeat over nd over and over again.
Like all children, Kenzie has her own distinct way of toilet training. For her, it’s a weapon, an exercise in control over parents who try and guide her every thought and action. This was never more obvious than the night she and Zander were wrestling me on the floor.
The smell was overwhelming. A pungent, almost putrid noxiousness that caused mucus to slither from each nostril. Thick and dark like swollen storm clouds, the scent advanced commando style across the living room.
Zander and I cowered nervously in a corner. The stink was abhorrent; smelling like foul fermenting seaweed on a windless August day.
Kenzie poked her tiny, dignified rear end in the air. Like an M-16 assault rifle, she aimed the tiny half moons toward us, backing up, slowly and methodically, cornering her prey like a venomous snake child. Her pouting lips bent into a wry smile as she slithered in for the kill. Her baby ass was a lethal lawn dart of viscous poop, the consistency of chocolate pudding.
“Kenzie’s diaper is filled with poo poo,” Zander shouted as he scurried backward, laughing with delight. The boy has a grip on the obvious, I thought to myself, as I too side stepped her thrusting little butt.
“She’s a skunk baby,’ Zander hollered. “Watch out, she’s trying to gas us out.”
Zander wasn’t kidding. Kenzie suddenly had the upper hand in this no holds barred Cordan family wrestling match.
You see every night the kids want to fight their dad. It’s a huge freak show of a battle where everyone takes off their shirt and wrestles to the death. I usually have to get down on all fours and swing my arms wildly like an over-weight crab. The kids attack like Commanches looking to scalp heads. We become a flesh filled jungle gym as the kids wrap their legs around my torso, choke hold my Adam’s apple and pull back on my neck like a bucking bronco that needs to be tamed.
Tonight; Kenzie opted for a new tactic. Her odiferous assault was launched with a full pant-load of piping hot defecation. It was a military move that would have made Patton smile.
‘watch out for me,’ she said. “I am stinky. I am Kenzie. I am smelly.
She shuffled forward. Zander and I scrambled. Kenzie’s diaper was a festering battering ram, sagging and stinking, moving into battle formations like a garrison of murderous marines storming a beach.
She laughed maniacally knowing how badly she smelled. As she pranced around the room, a green phosphorescent fog trailed behind her. Zander dove over the couch and scrambled on hands and knees under the living room table. Kenzie shrieked with satisfaction. Having successfully divided our forces, she set out after daddy.
Like an octogenarian I back peddled, bumbling and painfully stepping on sharp matchbox cars and bulbous piles of beanie babies. Suddenly my back was to the wall. She had me cornered.
With her butt high in the air, and with her chin resting on her shoulder, she backed toward me, carefully zeroing in like a heavily caffienated truck driver backing into a tight parking space. As she passed the Xmas tree, her eyes reflected a million bulbs and her teeth flashed like stainless steel knives. She was a barracuda swimming through her own ocean of stink. Suddenly she was upon me. She was laughing, her wild, blonde hair standing on end. Zander kneeled on the couch, from a safe distance. He shrieked, the inevitable; “she’s getting her stink on you daddy, run. Run for you life.”
Run for your life. My boy wasn’t kidding. It was too late. Kenzie pushed her spongy little butt into my thigh. I was a goner.
I felt like a rabbit being squeezed in the massive, muscle coiled clenches of a python. The invisible odor grabbed me. I felt it’s powerful endoskeleton constrict against my sinuses, pinning me against the wall with the strength of a Borax Mule kicking me in the head. She laughed evilly as some demonic force grabbed the air in the corner and yanked it away like a magician pulling a table cloth from beneath fine china on a dinner table. I suddenly knew what it was like to be out of breath in the furnaces of Hades. I was inhaling a choking, combustible fog that was so thick I kept waiting for the smoke detector to go off.
I wiped my eyes, patted Kenzie on the head and quickly side stepped her toddler attack. “game over,” I quickly said as I headed for the kitchen. I put my head in the ice box and breathed in the soothing vapors of frozen air. The icy breaths rushed down my esophagus, cooling the inflamed tissue. I exhaled and shouted for help. “Dana, I think Kenzie needs a diaper change.”
Meanwhile; Kenzie raised her arms over her head triumphantly. For the first time, she was the unadulterated champion of Cordan family wrestling. Such is the power of poop, and the time honored tradition of toilet training.
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12) POO POO JUICE
1) that’s very funny….psychologically, i am losing the battle. my kids arewearing me down. i constantly wonder how i am going to make it….especially after kenzie had diaherra and started screaming cause she had poopoo juice…i’m losing it dude… KENZIE HAD DIAHERRA TONIGHT AND SCREAED OUT…”MOMMY I HAVE POO POO JUICE”