Ask Poops, Please

Putting my two cents in.

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Location: Belmont, New Hampshire, United States

Born and bred in a small New England town, I am convinced that I know something about everything, and that my opinion matters. If only to me. Well, you'll see what I mean. And I love to knit, so you'll see what kind of things I'm doing when I should be vacuuming the living room.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

My Life Is All About Pee

If a frank discussion of urine offends your delicate sensibilities, I'm quite sure we've never met and have nothing whatsoever in common. You probably clicked away when you saw pee. If not, do it now, and God bless you as you go on your way.

Pee is not for everyone.

I, strictly speaking, am up to my urethral meatus in it.

First, there's Dave. Now, he's only two and can't control where his pee goes. Most days we're lucky he gets both feet heading in the same direction at the same time. When you have a toddler, let's face it, Pee Happens. (As does Poop, Boogers, and Saliva).

But my little man is a very big toddler. He's in the biggest diaper they make "over the counter". If you're sitting there and you can tell me of a store that sells a disposable diaper that goes past a size 6, do let me know. Daytime isn't bad. I can change him frequently during the day and keep his clothes and our furniture dry.

But nighttime? Oh, it's bad. He wakes up every morning completely soaked. I get him out of the crib and then strip it every day, and every day I have to wash sheets and blankets. On the bright side, being wet doesn't seem to phase him in the least and he doesn't wake me up because he's uncomfortable. Which is good. And his mattress is vinyl, so it's not like he can wreck it.

I bought some stuff to make diaper doublers that I can reuse, but haven't found someone to sew them for me. I made a prototype to see how many layers of the absorbent fabric I'd need, and he managed to fill his diaper that night with the most copious liquid poo I've yet encountered. I tried rinsing the doubler out to reuse it, but the poo wouldn't rinse off. I threw it out.

I have some Poise pads in the "necessary" cupboard over the toilet that I might try sticking in there. The thing is though, I'm sure if he was a girl this would work. Girls fill their diaper from the middle and it sort of distributes between the front and back from there. Boys pee all up front, especially when they sleep on their tummies. His diaper is completely dry in the back. So I'm wondering if I stick a pad or a doubler in the front of his diaper--which is already being put to the test, mind you--if there'll be room for his weasel in there!

Oh, the dilemma of what to do about pee.

But is that all? Not by a longshot. Emma is a piss-monkey too. She wasn't completely potty-trained when she entered kindergarten, even though everyone reassured me she would be. So now when anyone bemoans the potty-training process and some other well-meaning soul chimes in with "Just relax. No one goes to school wearing diapers!" I remind them of what Em's kindergarten teacher told me: "Half of them should."

Again, it's the nighttime that's the worst. I can stand the occasional daytime accident, but honestly now that school is in and they take scheduled bathroom breaks, she doesn't "forget" that she has to go and piss her pants anywhere near as much.

But she's officially a bedwetter. Her mattress is going to eventually have to be burned, and this week I got so sick of washing her sheets along with Dave's that I put her back into Pull-Ups at night. Again, she's too big for the biggest size they make, so they're not quite up to the task either. They're for pee-pee accidents, not "I think I'll just let fly right here."

So her mattress is wrapped in a vinyl cover, her ass is swaddled in a Depends, and I'm sitting here waiting for both their sheets and blankets to finish in the washer so I can toss them in the dryer.

My life is all about pee.

But I have a confession to make. In a way, I deserve this.

You see, I slept on rubber sheets until I was in junior high. Yes, I was a bedwetter. And you know what else? Most nights I'm about 10 seconds away from still being a bedwetter. You ever have those dreams where you really have to pee and you're running all around trying to find a bathroom, only there isn't one? Or you find one and it's busy or there's no seat on the toilet, or no water? So you go outside and you're about to pee behind a bush or a tree or in a coffee can but someone comes up and starts talking to you so you can't go and before it goes on much further, you wake up and RUN to the bathroom? I have them almost every night. Except more than once what woke me up is being relieved that I found a place to cop a squat and the feeling of starting to pee wakes me up and I RUN to the bathroom to pee and wipe the trickle off my leg. (Don't judge me, either. I've had three babies and I'm over 40. You do the math.)

Yeah. Is it little wonder that my 6 year old and her immature bladder don't wake up?

I also have a bathroom phobia of sorts. It's better than it used to be, but I peed my pants every day on the way home from first grade. I didn't like to use the bathrooms at school. I still don't. I will use a public restroom as a last resort even now. The upshot is that I didn't like anyone to know that I had to pee. I didn't want to have to ask to use the bathroom because then the other kids and the teacher would know what I was doing. It was none of their business. So I'd pee my pants on the way home. If we'd lived on Sargent St., I might have made it, too. (I'd usually make it as far as the Lyman's before I'd lose it.) As you can see on the following graphic, I was unusually advanced for my age in terms of "Where you can pee v. age".

To this day, I don't want to pee where people can hear me. For those of you who are wondering if I can poop in public, that's another whole hangup for another whole post. And if you are actually wondering about if I have any poop hangups, you must really be my best friends.

Or you're a Jacobs and Thanksgiving came early this year.

Or you've got one hell of a Google browser history to explain.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Farmer Girl

Remember how I told you that I had proof that Bug was big enough to drive the tractor?
I was right.
One advantage to being too big for the rides at Storyland is that you're probably big enough for way more fun and cool stuff like Tractor Driving.
This, by the way, is how we celebrate Labor Day on High Street: by ignoring child labor laws and putting the kids to work picking hundreds of pounds of tomatoes and then delivering them via tractor.Farmer's markets...pshaw. Them's for city folk.


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