Today is Sunday. By the time you read this it will be Monday. I usually write my posts the night before during the one-hour sweet spot that my wife gives me each night that I've creatively dubbed "me-time." It's a 60 minute respite from the child, kinda like a Scooby Snack, for keeping the child alive throughout the day. On the days when you don't see a post you can assume that I either fell asleep during "me time" or chose to spend it curled up in a corner beside a pile of my broken dreams. I want to do both of those things, but something is telling me to write. Friday was so bad that I really just wanna use the rest of today to get over it.
What happened?
Well let's see...Potty Training is harder than I thought. About four or five months ago she was fully trained. If she had to go then she'd say, "Potty. P-O-T-T-Y. Potty." I'd take her and she'd go. It was like putting a man on the moon. All the people who live inside my head were standing around inside the control room wearing white shirts and black ties congratulating one another. It was one small step for man, one giant leap for our finances. Do you know how much diapers cost?
I don't know if she mistook my pride for insolence or something. Maybe she found the list of stuff we were gonna buy with the $60 a month we'd save sans-Pull Ups. All I know is that she regressed with a passion. It seemed almost deliberate. No more "P-O-T-T-Y." No more anything. She'd just stare at me as she shat in her Pull-Up. Fine. Message received. We backed off for a while. Let her breathe. Then came last month. We went back to potty training. Things were looking up...until Friday.
To quote Jay-Z and Too $hort, "It was all good just a week ago." Last week she was going to the potty with no problem. We even got some "victory" Sesame Street underwear (freedom drawers, if you will). Then Friday she started peeing off schedule. No big deal. Then she shat in her diaper. I wrote it off as an accident. Dora did ask some tough questions that day. I can't expect her to unlock her mind and control her bowels at the same time. She's only human, right?
But then she went again about 30 minutes later just as we were about to leave the house. It wasn't that excusable diarrhea consistency either. No, this took effort to push out. I was pissed because it took forever to get her dressed. Getting a two year old dressed is like reenacting a coyote-roadrunner cartoon in your house. I kept my cool though and stuck to the script. As a parent you have to remember your lines and stay in character.
You can't tell them that the family car is about to be towed because you're parked in a rush hour lane and it's almost 4:00. You can't tell them that you have no problem putting Dora and Elmo up for sale on Craigslist to cover the cost of getting the car out of the impound lot. Instead you just recite your lines, "Sweetie you had an accident. You have to tell Daddy the next time you have to boo-boo."
We went to the store and came back about 20 minutes later. I sat on the couch and tried to relax a bit by watching some TV. The kid was calm and acting normal again. The whole house was quiet except for the television and that sent my parental spider sense tingling. Unless they're asleep, quiet=bad when you have a kid. I looked down and she was playing innocently on the floor...with a handful of shit.
Not only did she go on herself, but she went into the Pull-Up and pulled some out and was making some kind of artifact on the recently cleaned carpet. I'm not talking about a wet-vac or The Rug Doctor from the grocery store. Our rental office actually paid someone to come in and do annual cleaning. It took a whole day and a half to get the carpet to dry and only three minutes for her to draw some cave painting on the floor.
I was done. I checked out at that point. It wasn't like going on herself was theonly crazy thing she'd done that day. The potty malfunctions were like the intermission between her usual "I'm a two year old ball of energy" antics of the day. I grabbed her by the wrists so as to not get any of it on me and tried to walk her to the bathroom. The floor looked like that "Footprints" poster (the one about Jesus carrying someone) because she'd apparently painted her feet with it first before going to the carpet. So I had to pick her up. I just dropped her in the tub and gave her a civil rights movement "We shall overcome" shower with the handheld shower head.
I dried her off and put her in the high chair while I spent the next hour cleaning the carpet. Fast forward to now and I'm still trying to get over it. All I keep thinking...
"It was all good just a week ago."
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