Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Wiping Butts with that English Degree

Potty training my children was not my finest moment. I’m still not sure how one goes about properly potty training a child. I can say they were all potty trained by the time they started kindergarten, but I can’t tell you how I managed to accomplish that feat. (And for the record, I can’t house train a dachshund, either. That’s why Laverne and Shirley spend their days outside.)

My mother-in-law tried to help me teach the kids to use a toilet, and she was good with the girls. But I had to draw the line with her idea of where it was appropriate for a boy to relieve himself. When my son was three, he jumped out of her pool and yelled, “I have to go potty!” She praised him for not going in the pool but, realizing that he might have an accident if he waited to dry off with a towel, she instructed him to just go in the bushes. He obediently pulled down his pants and then turned around so that his fanny faced her flowers and began to take a dump in her daisies.

So when it came time for my sister to potty train the twins, she called me for advice. The bitch. She was just trying to rub my nose in my potty-training failures.

After listening to and summarily rejecting my advice, she decided the best method for her was to buy them pretty princess panties and take them and the kiddie potty outside for the day. The idea was that they wouldn’t want to mess up the new panties but if they did have an accident, it happened in the garage and not on her hand-hooked rug.

Yeah, right. We can’t let Ariel, the freaking Little Mermaid who LIVES IN THE OCEAN, get wet. Even a toddler sees through that bullshit.

I pulled into her driveway that afternoon, and the girls jumped off the miniature Harleys they were riding to show me the Sponge Bob tattoos I’d helped them apply to their bodies the day before. Faith asked for another tattoo, and her mother said, “Go pee pee in the potty, and you can have another tattoo.”

My sister’s raising Harley-riding miniature Tommy Lees. While I’m visiting my kids at rehab Family Week in Arizona, she’s going to be visiting her Hell’s Angels at Biker Week in Daytona. I guess all we can do is raise our kids the best way we know how, to let them know we love them unconditionally, and then push them out of the nest with a good education and a set of straight teeth. The rest is up to them.

When I left that day, both girls were standing in the driveway peeing in their new Ariel panties.

No comments:

Post a Comment