some other unfortunate side-effects of potty training...

as with all my lists, these ain't in no p'tic'lar order, and there aren't going to be a nice, round number of items. maybe i will stop at 9, and drive you nuts as your ocd niggles you about the #10 that ought to have been. maybe i'll stop at two if i get bored or a shiny object distracts me. if the sloppiness of the endeavor bothers you, just walk away now... (and get medicated. it helps. i promise.)



#1 - THE CHEERLEADING. okay, you're supposed to offer lots of positive reinforcement for potty-training kids. the parenting books say so. children being great imitators, i now have my own personal cheering section every time *i* go to the bathroom, complete with chocolate rewards. even if i remember to lock the door before dropping my pants, i still generally have a conversation with spazmonkey and dramaqueen that goes something like this:

DQ: *knock* *knock* *knock*

me: go downstairs!

SM: MOOOOOOOOOOOM? whatchoo doon in dere?

me: go downstairs!

SM: MOOOOOOOOOOM? are you peein in da poddy?

me: yes. go downstairs!

*long silent pause until they hear the toilet flush*

DQ: YAY! bye-bye yellow wadder!

SM: goooood JOB, mommy! you wanna da chockwit?

DQ: yay! chockwit!

SM: mom? MOOOOOOO-OOOOOOOM! gotta find da chockwit mountains!

DQ: yay! chockwit mountains!

SM: mom? MOOOOO-OOOOOOOOM! did you poop?

DQ: chockwit POOPIES!

*both twits dissolve into laughter, because scatological references are universally funny, even before language skills have truly developed.*


#2 - THE NEW FOCUS ON THE PENIS. hey, if this thing is good for peeing in the potty and earning hershey's kisses, maybe it has some other cool undiscovered uses, too. the new access granted by the general state of nudity these days allows for endless experimentation. spazmonkey's new favorite game is "what ELSE will my pecker fit into?" (answer: definitely playdoh.)


#3 - GETTIN SPONTANEOUS WITH THE DEFINITION OF "POTTY." i can remember once, while evilgremlin was potty training, being in the kitchen and hearing him say, over the top of a tinkly noise, "look, mom! i peein in the drain!" he was too short to be peeing in the sink, so i turned around to see what kind of "drain" he was talking about. it was the "air-conditioning vent" kind.

so far, dramaqueen has happily peed in his r2d2 snack bowl (evilgremlin was annoyed because he wasn't done with the popcorn in it yet) and an empty soda can. public service announcement: do not leave your drink unattended around here.

the power

so spazmonkey has been fascinated by a pull-ups commercial that plays a clip of the song "the power" by snap. he runs around randomly yelling "i got da POW-AH!" and pumping his fist in the air. i realized last night that i probably had that mp3 somewhere on my computer... found it and played it for him. he studiously ignored me as i tried to explain to him what i was doing, but the instant the song got to the key lyrics, his jaw dropped and his eyes got so big you'd think santa claus had just plopped naked into the fireplace bearing chocolate, scissors and matches. by the 4th time playing the song, spazmonkey was breakdancing and howling like james brown on a 3-day coke bender. i was laughing so hard it was difficult to keep the camera steady.

spazmonkey's spazout movie

potty training... it doesn't quite suck...

did you know you don't get to send kids to preschool unless they're potty trained? i've paid the deposit on my nine hours a week of sweet, sweet freedom next fall, and if that isn't an incentive for me to get their narrow white asses the hell out of diapers, i don't know what is. so, they're three, they're waking up dry about half the time, their english skills are finally reasonable enough to communicate about simple actions... so i cleared a few weeks on my busy social calendar to sit on the damned couch and stare at a couple of boys' crotches.

now, i must say, i'm a HUGE fan of waiting until the age of three to potty train. it takes SO much less time. i read a study once that showed that if you start before the age of two, you actually finish potty training PAST THE AGE of those who start after age three. that's right... you spend more than an extra YEAR in the "training" stage. man, fuck that. who the hell needs to argue with a stupid two-year-old ("but my two-year-old is SMART!" you say? you mean smart for a two-year-old? yeah, i've had me three of them... smart for a two-year-old = stupid. that's how it is. get over it.) about where he's puttin his poop? not. me.

so. i cleared my calendar to watch a couple of twits sit on the potty and pee. by the morning of day 3, i realized that "sit on the potty and pee" is not necessarily the same thing as "pee in the potty." my parents bought a steam cleaner. since the twins were born, it's been on permanent loan to the loser household. i think we'll be using it about once a week now until the situation resolves.

okay, my mom, saint that she is, kicked off the process - thank god. i don't have the patience. now, the first big hurdle in potty training is getting them comfortable with the idea that they can pee in the potty AND NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN. because until they've actually made a couple of deposits without incident, you will have to drag them screaming and crying to the potty as if it was the pediatrician's office. the easiest way to force a deposit is sit the kid on the potty chair, give him a coloring book or playdoh, and a diet coke with a straw in it. 12 oz of fluid + the diuretic caffeine = piss you can only hold onto for so long.

now, when she did this for evilgremlin, he held it HARD. the kid has a bladder of steel, and has never wet the bed, not even in the first weeks of potty training. so after drinking his soda, he held it for over an hour. he was sweating and shaking, you could see his poor little abs tensing... then he finally let it fly. and he had an epiphany immediately - "oh, was THAT all you wanted?" one time was all it took, and he never had a problem peeing in the potty after that. (pooping was another story entirely... he spent 6 months hiding behind curtains, under tables, and in his outdoor jungle gym, which positiverolemodel nicknamed "the outhouse," to poop in his underwear until he finally decided to give that up to the potty gods, too.)

so my mom did the same thing for the twins. day one... after about an hour, spazmonkey couldn't hold his diet coke anymore, drained into the potty, and got a hershey's kiss reward. dramaqueen quietly observed, made a token effort at begging for a hershey's kiss of his own, but quickly gave up when my mom confirmed that a "chockwit mountain" was contingent upon "puttin da yellow wadder in da poddy." so dramaqueen sat there. drained his diet coke. sat there. whined. got a second diet coke. sat there. okay, at three hours and 24 oz of diet coke, he didn't even look UNCOMFORTABLE. at three and a half hours, he finally peed in the potty, got his hershey's kiss, pulled up his pants, ran into the living room, and peed all over the carpet. damn.

so that was saturday. sunday, day two, went about the same... long hours of sitting on the potty. then my parents went home. day 3 was monday, and they were all mine. it went okay. there were a lot of misses, but several hits. the biggest barrier to success was having underwear to pull down before peeing. spazmonkey's chosen method of dealing with this was to let some fly in his pants, squeeze it off, and stand by the potty yapping about the yellow water coming until i pulled the undies down for him. dramaqueen just sat down with them still on, knowing he'd eventually soak through and get at least some of it in the potty, earning his chockwit mountain.

so day four, i got a dvd of erasure videos in the mail. the twits, having gone to an erasure concert with me a month before birth and having learned to sing along to their acoustic album in the car, are down with erasure. so i put that on the big screen, put the potty chairs in front of the tv, and stripped em naked. worked beautifully. they were transfixed by the videos, didn't stray far from the potties, danced their naked butts off, improvised lyrics ("lay all your loooooove on meeeeee playdoh! i'm a pirate, arrrgh!" and "aaaaalways i want to pee wif you, i want to pee wif you, and happy and happy and oh love!" were two of my favorites) and it didn't take them long to figure out that when the dancing suddenly became uncomfortable and they needed to hunch over, it was time to sit down and pee.

so, here we are on day 5, and not only are they pooping on the potty without even me in the room, they're taking the little cup out of the potty chair, trotting it to the real toilet, and flushing. oh, yeah. and that's what potty training a 3-year-old is like. maybe they'll even earn their spiderman undies back in the next week or two, and i'll be able to take them out of the house again.



now, a final note: all this focus on penises and toilets is not without side-effects. dramaqueen decided flushing was fun. he tried to flush my brand new goddamned moonpie tshirt that two boxtops and $5 had just gotten me (the back reads EAT MO' PIE ... oh, yeah. it's classy as hell.) spazmonkey took a break from demanding that i make playdoh rockmonsters and robotmonkeys and asked for a penis. and i learned something about my artistic skills... i cannot sculpt a cocknballs worth a DAMN. okay, when your sculpture has one three-year-old squealing with laughter and another one indignantly yelling "huh? HUUUUHHH??? no, no, NO, dat's NOT a PENIS, mommy, yucky penis, NO!" ... you know you suck.

picnic

so one of the docs had a picnic for all the new residents... a family picnic. as in, we took the kids. now, they were expecting kids, but not necessarily *our* kids - if you need evidence of that, look no further than the fact that they served food and owned carpet. so, here follows a list of objects in the hosue misused by the kids in the two hours we were there:

FOOSBALL TABLE: evilgremlin has played some foosball with his opa, and can do a credible job of moving the ball in the right direction most of the time. he managed to play several reasonably civilized games (and by "civilized," i mean that his trash-talking stopped short of name-calling) with several of the other kids and residents. then one of the residents invited the twits to play... they're still just barely too short to see over the edge of the foosball table, but really liked the idea of big sticks with grippy handles used to whack balls. this quickly degenerated into an eye-stabbing contest with the ends of the sticks.

CANDLES: yep. there were lit candles all over the house. that is, they were lit until spazmonkey and dramaqueen appointed themselves the candle-blowing-out committee. i considered trying to stop them, then realized that there was nothing else they were going to come up with in the "fun with candles" category that was even remotely acceptable in polite company.

BUSTER: this poor little fat pug couldn't find a hidey-hole small enough that the skinny-ass 3-year-olds couldn't squeeze into as well. not that they're mean to animals... they approach slowly, pet gently, don't try to pull, sit on, chase, or otherwise fuck with dogs or cats... but they like to stand close. reeeeeeeeal close. and there are two of them. an older fat dog can only take so much of that.

PAPER PLATES: okay, so dramaqueen, aka lunchbox mcloser, actually does understand the appropriate usage of paper plates. he just doesn't understand that, in any given situation, most of them do not belong to him. he managed to troll a whole line of residents' plates for the good stuff before positiverolemodel stopped him.

RED-HOT SPICY POTATO CHIPS: probably shouldn't have been fed to buster. i hereby apologize to anyone who has to smell that little dog for the next 24 hours or so.

INDOOR BASKETBALL GAME: before you get a mental image of three little thugs with full-sized basketballs crashing through someone's house as i scream at them to stop... no. they're not bad children, per se, they just have a creative, expanded definition of good. right next to the foosball table on the porch was one of those little free-standing indoor basketball tables, in which you throw soft little balls at a hoop, and they roll back down a net ramp for you to pick them up and throw again. evilgremlin actually got addicted to, if not better at, this game. his brothers, once again too short to really pull it off and too proud to let mommy hold them up to play, decided the best way to be a part of the game was to get UNDER the net ramp, so they could jump around and use their heads to knock the returning basketballs around. since the table did not topple, and nobody's head actually went through the net, we're going to chalk that up to good clean fun.

so at 6 pm, we came home and i took a 3-hour nap. apparently, it wore those little turds out, too, because this is still the scene in the twits room as of 7:54 AM...

particle men, particle men...

okay, the water table would probably be a lot more useful at buying me time to clean the house if every twenty minutes or so i wasn't interrupted by some banshee nonsense about "WET! MOMMMMMEEEEE I WEEEEEEEEEET! YUCKY WATER WEEEEEEEEEET!" because the only solution is dry clothes, followed by another self-dunking, apparently. lather, rinse and repeat.

i give good gifts!

for example... these are the fathers' day gifts i handed out:

"Daddy Needs a Drink" by Robert Wilder



and



that second one is backordered til about february 5. and if they fuck this up and send me the XY model instead of the XX, i'm totally returning it for a refund.

haircuts

my hairy little monkeys can totally dominate the noonoo.