A Pee-Ric Victory
After last night's 3 AM lament, I found myself still in bed at 10:15. When I woke, Elijah was in the bathtub. Fifteen minutes later, I pulled him out of the tub and sat him on his throne. We chatted idly about the usual topics: Whales, dinosaurs, scary monsters, and popsicles.
Suddenly, a geyser!
He'd taken the protective cup out of his throne and tossed it across the room, so his pee was spraying across the bathroom floor. I took hold of his peenie and thrust it back into the pot.
"Keep it in there, Elijah!" I said.
The throne started to make its trumpet sound, insistent, loud, and continual. It bleated throughout the entire urination.
"Regina! It's happening!"
"I'm doing it, mommy!" Elijah said.
"REALLY?" said Regina. "Hooray! Hooray!"
"I'm peeing!"
"He's peeing!"
"He's peeing!"
His penis popped out again. Again, I shoved it back into the pot.
DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH! went Elijah's throne.
When it ended, we praised him. He ran around, shouting "I did it! I did it!" So then we let him have his prize. Regina had found a Scholastic collection video of Maurice Sendak stories on sale at the H.E.B. Elijah watched that video this summer at his cousin's house, and he'd loved it, especially In The Night Kitchen. He considered this a prize worthy of his efforts.
However, I'm not sure how much of this small success was due to the fact that Elijah has suddenly developed an idea of what it means to go to the bathroom. It's probably more that the water was warm, and it stimulated matters urethral. I quizzed him after the video was over, and his ignorance showed.
"Elijah," I said, "what does poo come out of?"
"Your butt!" he said.
"Right. And what does pee come out of?"
"The potty."
"No. Pee comes out of your peenie. That's what you call it an, um, peenie."
"No! Pee doesn't come out of your peenie! That's silly."
A pause.
"Can I have some ice cream now?"
As the day slogged on, Elijah peed on the living room carpet, and then he pooped in his underwear. When Regina took the underwear into the bathroom to toss the poop in the potty, it fell out and she stepped in it. Then, later, Elijah sat on the throne for 20 minutes, during which time he threw a hairbrush, a pair of his underwear, and a full bag of wet wipes into the grownup potty. We then read several books, and when that session ended, he immediately ran into our bedroom and peed in front of Regina's closet.
The road goes on forever.
Afterward, Elijah and I played a game called "Ellsworth Kelly and Jeff Koons Go To The Zoo." Regina got him a book of shapes that uses actual artwork as examples. Elijah thinks that those two artist names are absolutely hilarious. I was Jeff Koons and Elijah was Ellsworth Kelly. Apparently, this zoo only contained lions (our cats), but we couldn't go to the zoo because it was underwater and if we got out of our underwater train, the sharks would eat us. Then, midway through our trip to the zoo, Elijah inexplicably stopped the train, which was actually his bed, so he could go to the "battery store." He then jumped off the bed, snatched a plastic banana, got back up, and said, "there. Now we have batteries so the sharks won't eat us."
In a three-year-old's world, everything symbolizes something else, and I don't mean man's inhumanity to man or something equally grand. It's a mindset of correlating nouns. An orange can be an apple and a monkey can be a zebra. It's all the same to kids. So there's got to be some combination of words out there that will persuade Elijah to abandon his soiling ways once and for all. I just know it. Soon, I will crack the code.