Potty Party

This afternoon, an eighteen-month old said "Potty" and I put her on the toilet and she took a shit.  It was one of the most satisfying things that I have done in a long time.

I have strong feelings about potty training.  It seems absurd to me that all over the world, babies are getting by without diapers and by the time they are a year old they are able to walk around and shit and poop, for the most part in appropriate places at the appropriate times. Apparently, during the first few months of life, infants naturally make a noise that alerts their mothers when they have to go.  If no one responds to this noise, they’ll stop making it and spend the next year or so of their lives filling their diapers full of piss and shit and sitting in it until someone notices and cleans them up. 

In North America, when children are around two years old, we decide that maybe they might enjoy the dignity and cleanliness of eliminating their excretions somewhere other than in their own pants.  The problem with this is that now they are two years old.  I have only been working with two-year-olds for a couple of months, but I have noticed that most of the time when I ask them if they would like to please do something, one of two things happens.

Either they burst into tears, or they say, “no,” at varying decibel levels. Two-year-olds are difficult people going through a traumatic stage of life.  Suddenly they are more aware of what they want, but due to language barriers or more often unrealistic expectations, they frequently won’t get it.  On top of this, they remain burdened by blocks they don’t want to put away, crayons they don’t want to share and now, piles of shit and piss that after a two-year urinary and scatological free-for-all, they are no longer allowed to keep sheltered in diapers snug next to their ass cheeks.  Modern potty training tactics include waiting for the child to show “interest” and “readiness” in the potty before suggesting a regular elimination routine or heaven forbid, removing diapers.  With the limited attention span and boundless angst that I’ve seen in most two-year-olds, I really don’t think that this is a very timely, logical or promising way of going about things.

Also paradoxical to me is that some children are able to create full-fledged sentences involving subjects, actions and complements before they are introduced to the purpose of the toilet and the implications of their colons and bladders.  Children wearing diapers today know the difference between an octopus and a shark, a panda bear and a koala bear.  Sometimes they make elaborate statements such as, “the pineapple is too sour.” 

I say, “Go take a shit on the toilet, and then we can talk about pineapples. And octopi.  With joy.”

I realize that keeping track of when an infant has to go and sticking it in a feces-and-urine- friendly receptacle seems strenuous and time-consuming, but isn’t that kind of what you sign up for when you have a kid?  I mean, the kid has already barreled through your love one’s or your own vagina.  Compared to this, I feel like the inconvenience and occasional mess that occurs when your baby needs to go are pretty minor.   Plus you’ll be done with diapers and most accidents a year and a half earlier than the average parent which will mean a sure savings in both time and money.

Obviously nobody will listen to me since I’ve never given birth, or raised a child, and I’ve barely worked with toddlers for a total of two months.  But I’m ready to devote my life to this.  I talk about it to everyone I meet.

“How was your day?” the nice lady at the grocery says. 

“Oh you know, not bad.  The children are wearing me out."

“Oh, you work at a school?”

“Yes.  With toddlers.  Did you know…”  I ask total strangers when they toilet trained their children.  I even brought it up with the guy who sold me my first mutual fund.  These conversations fill me with delight. 

“Why do you think you love it so much?” asked the Boatman.  He was standing above our toilet taking a piss. I didn’t hesitate with my answer.

“I’ve never been so certain about anything in my whole life.” 

“You’re gonna change the world, babe,” said the Boatman.  “One poop at a time.”  He said it and I’m ready.  Let’s make a new generation of babies who are toilet trained before they’re one and a half.  It makes so much sense for everyone involved.  And I haven’t even mentioned the mountains of diapers that won’t end up in landfills.  Or the gallons of bleachy water that the well-meaning eco-concious cloth-diaper parents won’t be using for laundry.  Or the little baby chakras.  I’m gonna leave the chakras out of this one.  No one wants to hear about little baby chakras. 

But the point is, Pampers and Huggies can kiss my ass.

We need a change, folks. Let’s make it.

And when it’s all over, we can have Potty Party.  

The Potty Party Song:

This is the Potty Party Song, by splashnboots, who I happen to be related to.  The Boatman and I have designated it as "Our Song." We recently sang it at a Karaoeke Party. Likely because both of us were toilet trained after the age of two, we were a bit weak on the verses which, as you will hear, are somewhat complex.  That said, we rocked the chorus.  I look forward to our next karaoeke opportunity.

This post is all over, but here's some valuable information on elimination communication, the common term describing the process of putting your baby on the potty:
EC simplified by an expert Mom, blogger, and author Andrea Olson
Some people, like Ingrid Bauer, a mother and blogger from B.C. call it Natural Infant Hygiene:  Check out her site at gentleparents.com.
And of course we have our friends at diaperfreebaby.org.
Hope your potty party's a blast. Feel free to tell me all about it.

Toilet Tales, a book I regret not writing.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt

Locks and Keys
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part Two
Three Things to Make the World a Better Place

Locks and Keys

When I was growing up, my mother used to lose her keys constantly.  She would cry and say, “I’m such an idiot.”  My father was never very sympathetic about it.  One night, when I was around seven years old, my mother had a new gig directing a choir in town that was thirty minutes away from our house.  After dinner, she was getting ready to leave, but she could not find her keys.
 

"Drink me" plus keys

“I’m such a stupid idiot,” she said.

“You have to learn to put them back in one place,” my father said.

“Please can I borrow your keys?” she begged him.

“No,” he said.  “You have to learn to keep them in one place.” 

My mother search the house some more.  Soon she was frantic, pulling out drawers and sliding books and other objects off of tables.

“Please!” she said to my father.  “I’m going to be late.”

“You have to learn to keep them in one place.”

“My mother started crying.  In my family, the women, they don’t cry softly.  They wail.  And the wailing is contagious. Once my mother started wailing, my sister would join in.  That night, my mother and my sister wailed on one side of the living room while my dad stood across from them, shaking his head.  I sat a bit off to the side.  I did not contract the wailing until later in life. That evening, I did not wail because I did not want my dad to think I was a stupid idiot.  Instead I clenched my jaw and bit my lip and scrunched up my face.  My mother and my sister were short and tiny, tinier than me even though I was the youngest.  They made up one team.  The Tiny Wailers.  My dad was the other team, the Big Tall Mean Man.  I was too large and too tall to be part of the Tiny Wailers’ Team.  But I wasn’t quite big enough to be part of the Big Tall Mean Man team.  Plus I didn’t think that my dad was that mean.  Not always. 

A couple of weeks ago, I started working at a Montessori school.  I speak French to the three to six year old children while they take activities off of wooden shelve and “do their work.”  One of their jobs is called “Locks and Keys.”  There are three small padlocks and three small keys of three different sizes.  All the locks are closed when the children take them out.  The children have to match the keys with the locks and unlock them.  Then they can link the locks and the keys in the chain and then unlock them again.  They can do this for as long as they want.  They have to be careful not to drop the keys on the floor.  When they are done, they have to put the locks back where they found them.  In one place.


Locks and Keys, for the Montessori Children

 Next to the three to six year old class, the toddlers take things off of shelves and they do their work.  Most of them are less than two years old.  They are terrible at putting things back in one place.  And they are too small to fit tiny keys into tiny locks.  It would be a choking hazard.  My first day on the job, the toddler teacher had a car problem, so I got to hang out with the almost two-year-olds.  They were very upset that their mothers were not there.  One of them cried so hard he threw up.

“Mama, Mama,” he wailed all morning.  Just like in my family, the wailing was contagious.  Once one child started, another joined in.  Soon there were five almost-two-year olds wailing at the top of their lungs.  I was not Mama and so there was nothing I could do.  There was wailing all morning.  At lunch time, my co-worker gave me the keys to her car where she’d forgotten her tea.  Now her head was pounding from the wailing and the caffeine withdrawal.  But the tea could not cure the Mommy Withdrawal.  Except for naptime, the children continued to scream and cry and wail all day long.

At 5 PM, I ran out the door to catch my bus.  I would have to re-evaluate the effectiveness of the withdrawal method. There was no way I could manage a two-year-old person for an entire year.  A couple of stops later, I saw that my co-worker had left a message on my phone.  I still had the keys to her car.  They were in my pocket.  I walked back and another co-worker drove me home.  As the days go by, I am growing to really like my co-workers. 

But that night I fell asleep to sound of children wailing.  And it has been a bad couple of weeks for keys.  I can’t find one of the keys to the yoga studio that I’m not teaching at much anymore.  I have the key to the door at the bottom of the stairs, but the not the top.  Or vice versa. 

Part two and a half of the bad keys phase:  On Tuesday at 6:50 a.m., I radiated through the house getting ready to leave for work.  This jobs entails waking up around 4:15 for a 4:40ish start to yoga practice.  I leave the house around seven o’clock.  As fate would have it, I don't find it that difficult.  It seems that I was made to wake up early.  Although by Friday, the truck of fatigue starts to hit me, most mornings I am obnoxiously cheerful. The Boatman often makes fun of me as he drools on his pillow.

“Bye babe, I love you,” I yelled on Tuesday morning as I grabbed my keys.  “I love you!” I repeated.

“Bye, love you” he mumbled. 

At 11:30, we took the children outside for playtime.  That’s when I usually peak at my cell phone for the time and for text messages.   Four missed calls from the Boatman.  “Did I have his keys?” he’d asked.  He’d looked everywhere.  His dad had to drive him to work.  I looked in my pocket.  I had two sets of keys.

Every time something happens with my keys, I remember that night in the living room.  My mother and my sister wailing on one side and my father on the other.  In the end, my father relented and lent my mother her keys.  But first he tied them to a frying pan with a piece of string. 

I immediately called the Boatman’s keys, as the bigger kids slid down the hills and the little kids wailed at my feet, calling for their mothers.

“I’m so sorry babe,” I said to his voice mail.  “I’ll pick you up from work.”  Probably he would never talk to me again.

I texted him with profuse apologies and the promise to pick him up for work.

It’s okay, babe, he wrote back.  I can get a ride home. 

And that was all.  No frying pans.  No wailing. And when you pick the children up and point at the sky where the moon is supposed to be, sometimes they stop screaming.  

The End.

This post was supposed to have an Alice in Wonderland reference, but it got cut.  I love Alice in Wonderland. When Alice in Wonderland gets to the bottom of the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a curious corridor full of locked doors.  She wants to go through a tiny door behind a curtain that leads to a beautiful garden.  On a glass table in the curious hallway, she finds a key. The key opens the tiny door to the garden, but Alice is too big to fit through.  She closes the door and goes back to the table where but the door is so tiny that she cannot fit through.  She is way too big.  Back at the glass table she finds a bottle labelled “Drink me.”  Maybe she was thinking, “What the hell, it’s wonderland.” In any case, whatever was in the bottle made her shrink so that she could fit through the door to the garden.  Too bad she’d left the key on the glass table and the door was locked.  Now she was back where she started, but smaller.  So she starts to cry a little before seeing a cake that says “EAT ME” and eating it.  Then she grows to nine feet tall and she can reach the key again, but the door is nine feet below.  So she starts to cry a whole bunch and her tears make an ocean that all of the animals swim in.  I thought that this was interesting.  Being the wrong size to fit through the door and/or not being able to find your keys. Plus eating and drinking things to solve your problems.  I like that part. Interesting.  Curious.  

End of abridged section.



Alice looks at door behind curtain.
 
Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook
Twitter: @mypelvicfloor
I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt
 
The Earth Will Shake Us off Like Fleas
How I am violent, by Erica J. Schmidt
What the fuck should I do with my life, Part One