Poopy Oopy Doopy
Welcome to a staple of the parenting-blog genre: The potty-training entry. Keep in mind that I'm writing this at the end of a 17-hour-day of more or less nonstop parenting, so you will excuse what may seem like an excessively grumpy attitude.
Sundays were pleasant once. Now, as I write this, my son is laying in bed, screaming "I POOPED ON MY ANIMALS!" as part of a ruse to extend a day that began before the sun came up. And tomorrow will be more of the same. Not only do I despise a 10 PM bedtime, it's even worse when you consider that it's followed by a 5:30 AM wakeup time, and worse still when you factor in that the first thing I do in the morning is watch Dora The Explorer. But I love my kid so very very much and he's my precious treasure and I couldn't live without him. That said, I really wish he'd stop crapping his pants.
I don't remember the first time I used the toilet. My parents have a photo of me straddling a Donald Duck head with a towel around my shoulders. It's a miracle, based off that photo, that I don't have a sexual fetish for poultry. But I use the toilet now. My son, on the other hand, just cleared his third birthday, and we're still cleaning up his stinky messes.
All the potty-training experts, professional and amateur, say that parents shouldn't put pressure on their kids about using the toilet, because it'll make their kids neurotic. I think it's time to make Elijah neurotic already. We've tried being laid-back, only putting him on the training seat intermittently, letting him pick out his own training potty, and not complaining when he chose a "throne" model that plays an electronic trumpet sound whenever he sits down.
As it turns out, he likes making that trumpet go off, but only by throwing hard plastic toys into his throne. From time to time, he'll express an interest in the lower functions and will sit on the pot with his pants down, but he usually loses interest by the third sounding of the trumpet. He's discovered that he can make it go off by whacking his penis on the side of the sensor. We've also tried "training pants," which is a strange name, because it sounds like we're training him to wear pants. These things don't work either, and so we find ourselves washing pee-soaked mounds of plastic every night, or at least two nights in a row, until we get sick of them.
Why am I talking about this? What has my life become?
When Elijah sits on the toilet and says "my poop is sleeping," that's about as cute as a kid can get, in my opinion. But when it's 6:45 AM and I'm facing a diaper full of light-brown creamy shit and I have to wipe great gobs of it off my son's testicles, I really find myself growing tired. This is not a small baby anymore. This is a fully conversant human being who eats almost as much meat as I do and whose crap smells almost as bad.
Because he's a boy now, I cannot say, as I want to sometimes, "Goddamn it, Elijah! I'm sick and fucking tired of wiping shit off your dick!" He would more or less understand what that meant. Instead, I kidify my conversation, and say "Daddy doesn't want to wipe poopie off your peenie anymore. Can you please start using the potty now?"
The answer is always no, followed by, about an hour later, "Look, daddy, I've got poopie on my hands, and I'm eating it." The fact that Elijah does not have poopie on his hands, and is not eating it, provides little solace. Poop jokes are less funny when you're swimming in a river of the stuff. Good lord, kid. Use the damn toilet already.