All My Fault

Potty Training is 1,456th thing that I was not ready for in terms of parenting. Its not something I planned for, knew how to do, or really even understood was actually happening even as it was happening. Several months ago, she just kept asking to sit on the toilet, and now, she wears underwear every day except for bed time. Outside of purchasing a peeing doll that came complete with her own pink toilet and sticker chart as well as two different types of toilet seats, I don't really even feel like I can take the credit for this next step in her development. But heck, anything that involves me spending less money and/or less time interacting with someone elses poop is a-okay with me.

Like so many things in our short lives as parents, this seemed like such a good idea when it began. Yeah, let her toilet train. No diapers. No wipes. One step closer to her being able to pour her own milk for her cereal on Saturday mornings so we don't have to get up. (Which is really what its all about for us.) But like most ideas that come to people with the Rock last name, good can go to bad and/or ridiculously annoying in an instant.

Suddenly, no trip into public was complete without one or two trips to check out the public restroom at that establishment. I should have known that a kid who is already on the brink of being OCD would be just FASCINATED by how every toilet works, what method they use to dispense soap, and what form of hand drying they offer. You truly have not seen so much glee in a child's face than when she see's her distorted reflection in the silver nozzle of one of those hot air hand dryers in some public facilities. "Look at my nose mommy. My big nose." She now lets out a sigh of great disdane if she walks into a public restroom and sees just plain old paper towels to be used for drying her hands.

There is also room in toilet training for me to fail miserably as a parent. Because of her affection for using toilets other than her own, sometimes I am not always 100% sure that she truly has to go. And as a Salmonella survivor (for which I should get one of those magnet ribbons that everyone has on their cars now), I'm just not all about going into a public restroom for kicks and giggles. I really need to be convinced that she needs to go, especially if we've already been once (or twice) in the past hour. Of course there are those times when I am wrong, wrong, and wrong, and she ends up wetting her pants. i.e. That one 100 degree day at the county fair when we were sitting in a hog barn when she literally pleaded to go to the bathroom, I refused to take her, then she made a huge puddle right next to the guy judging the 4-H pigs. And in my haste to clean things up once we got to the restroom, I left her to sit on the toilet alone, where she proceeded to fall in!! MOTHER.OF.THE.YEAR.

And there are always those moments when you think, "I should have left you in diapers until you were 7." Like when you're grocery shopping, and she says she has to go for a second time. And you say "no" because you are certain its motivated by a desire to get more of the free hand lotion they provide in there (and you forget she has diharrea), and she proceeds to more than simply wet her pants. And in your rush to check out with your groceries so you can take care of the matter in the privacy of your own car, you offer comforting words to her like "Its okay. It's your mom's fault. She should have listened to you." And you realize that she's really listening to you for once, because when you reach the check-out, and the clerk says to her, "Hi, how are you?" She replies...

"Ummm...I pooped my pants, but its my mommy's fault."

And I said I wouldn't be one of those bloggers who writes about poop!