Welfareloser's Blog

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.