Fecal Matters
I'm going to pay a serious price for staying up to write this tonight. It's 3 AM Central Standard Time. Regina gets up with the kid in the morning, but there's no way, even if she's at her most generous, that I'm getting out of bed after 9:30. She'll either directly shake me awake, or send the cat in to lick me, or send the kid in to lick me, or, worst of all, she will put on hard-soled shoes and walk about the room like she's doing something quite urgent, thereby making me feel guilty that I'm not helping her. I have responsibilities and probably shouldn't be up this late. But I took a couple of puffs off a joint tonight at a party, and the synapses have not quite yet stopped firing. So I will continue to discuss the topic that has all America buzzing: How I'm trying to get my son to stop crapping his pants.
The weekend after Thanksgiving, Regina and I went to Los Angeles to tend to moving matters, many of them Elijah-related, including buying him a cheap bed that we put together ourselves and subsequently decorated with a duvet that depicts colorful forest animals, topping off the ensemble with a one-eyed alien pillow. Yes, Elijah's bedroom is Scandanavian whismy, courtesy of the IKEA in Burbank. We also found him a preschool to attend when we arrive. It's on the site of a Jewish Community Center that officially closed a couple of years ago, but the neighborhood raised money to keep the preschool open anyway. It's chaotic there, and kind of dark, but I've never seen happier-looking kids at school in my life, except for at Elijah's current school. Apparently, if you let kids run around and play all day, they're happy. Who'd have thunk it?
Meanwhile, Elijah was at my parents' house in Phoenix, where he engaged in such useful pursuits as hiding sticks behind bushes, going for a walk to "look for purple tigers," and throwing grapefruit over the backyard wall. My parents generously took up the potty-training baton, but quickly realized that they were up against a champion diaper wearer. They had no luck at all. What did Elijah care? They were letting him eat a huge bowl of ice cream every day. My mother suggested, when we returned, that we should "bribe" Elijah to use the toilet. Awesome. If I'd received a prize for every time I'd taken a shit, I'd have had to rent a bank vault somewhere long ago.
So now we're attempting to use an incentive system that goes like this: "Elijah, if you poop in the toilet, you can go out for ice cream," or, "Elijah, if you pee, you can watch the new video that mommy and daddy bought for you." We'll tell him that these are one-time-only offers, that not every potty visit will be met with riches. I somehow doubt that it will work.
We have Elijah wearing underwear in the house now. The fact that the underwear has the words "Finding Nemo" on it doesn't keep Elijah from peeing on his bedroom floor, or from squeezing out a toddler-turd while watching television. He just doesn't seem to care. This morning Regina had him on the can for 20 minutes. He left without doing business, and then immediately proceeded to unleash a torrent of pee in the space between the living-room sofa and a side wall. We already have to clean up cat piss every day in the laundry room, because our semi-retarded ancient tabby cat marks his territory against the stray who sprays on the other side of the wall. Now we're cleaning up human pee, too. We get so distracted that occasionally we forget to take the dog out. My life is a river of multi-specied piss.
We've come to the conclusion that Elijah, while quite brilliant and imaginative in many ways, is just slow physically. He walked late, he climbed late, and he just started really jumping about two weeks ago. He still can't figure out how to blow his nose, for god's sake. When faced with a tissue, he sucks in. So it's entirely possible that he just doesn't understand that the rumbly in his tumbly means that he's about to take a shit. He doesn't know a bladder from a soccer ball, so how would he understand that his bladder is full? Meanwhile, I stand back and think, dammit, kid. How hard can it be?