Poop P.S.

Just wanted to let curious readers know the happy ending to the poop saga: Roo is fully potty trained, at long last. She poops in the appropriate place with little ceremony and no need for bizarre rituals involving submersion in warm water. She likes to announce her success loudly, usually characterizing her output as either a "big snake poop" or an "elephant poop," and she still gets a treat whenever she drops a deuce. But aside from that, it's just routine.

She did ask me today, "Why don't you and Daddy and O. get a treat when you poop?" I told her that when you get to a certain age, you just don't get a treat anymore for something so normal. Then I added, "At a certain point, pooping is its own reward." (I refrained from saying "My reward is that I get to be alone and unmolested for five whole minutes!")

"I still like to get a treat when I poop," she told me. Of course you do, little Roo. Of course you do.

The Poop Saga, Part II

OK, for those of you just tuning in, you need to go back and read part I of the Poop Saga first.

So, we had threatened to withhold dessert unless Roo started pooping in the potty. (Please remember my disclaimer about the word poop - I hate this word! Which makes all of this that much harder. But it's a little to squalid to be constantly talking about your child "shitting" or "dumping" when you have to talk about it so damn much, as you do when you have a toddler. Especially one who refuses to get her shit where all human shit must eventually get.) But now we were ready to actually do it.

It's amazing how hard it is to imagine eating dessert while my barely-three-year-old daughter goes without. Note the subjunctive mood there. My Old Man and I have not actually inflicted this torture on her as of yet. The closest we've come is saying "Well, I guess no dessert tonight." But to actually sit and fill our faces with ice cream sundaes or poppyseed brioche while she looks on, crying inconsolably. No, we haven't had the heart to actually do it yet.

Now DoctorMama sagely comments that no dessert does not in any way approach child abuse, and that is true. But first of all, Roo is only two weeks past her third birthday. The whole "if you don't do this, an unwanted consequence will ensue at some later point" thing is beyond her. Plus, she's totally fucking adorable and the thought of her crying in anguish while watching me do the thing she wants to do more than anything in the world at that moment just makes me lose my appetite, even where chocolate Häagen-Dazs is concerned.

Basically, I just can't say no to this face:



Or, at the very least, I have a really hard time saying "No ice cream for you. But ice cream for me and your dad and your brother!"

Okay, so this brings us to the other night, the night of the "breakthrough" poop. I frame that in air quotes because it was sort of a breakthrough poop for Roo, but more a poop midwifed with much patience and work on my part. So who knows if it is truly the dawn of a new day here at Casa Oral Hygiene.

Okay, the "breakthrough" night. Basically, the Old Man and I had decided Yes, this is it. We will sit and eat dessert and Roo will have none, and this will inspire her to get it in the john where it belongs, and soon! So as dinner ended and we prepared to move on to dessert, Roo, who was well aware of our plan to have dessert without her, proclaimed that she had to poop. Okay, fine, I thought, Maybe she'll be moved to actually make this happen. So we went upstairs and she sat on her little red Baby Björn potty. And she sat. And sat. And it became clear to me that this was not going to happen. She wanted to poop. It had been three days - she undoubtedly had something to work with in there. But she had developed this thing about pooping, and now she really couldn't make it happen.

I've never been so tempted to give my three-year-old a strong cup of coffee.

But then I had a thought. Roo needed a bath. And it had gotten to the point where if she sat in a warm bath for a bit, a turd would emerge without fail. What if I put her in her bath and just waited for a sign, then whisked her out of the bath onto the little red potty? Here we see what a weak soul I truly am. While I should have been downstairs enjoying some dessert to the tune of childish wailing, I was upstairs cooking up a plan that risked yet another terrifying encounter with RMS Turdtanic.

I won't give you a detailed blow-by-blow of the next half hour, but suffice to say that I put Roo in her bath, with the red potty on the bath mat nearby, and we proceeded to do a little dance of in-the-bath, out-of-the-bath-and-on-the-potty, repeat, rinse, repeat. Finally, tired of the back and forth that was getting the floor more and more wet (and determined to avoid another poop-fishing incident), I just set the potty in the bathtub (the bathwater thankfully rising to a point below the potty's rim), and she sat on it while I washed her hair. And, finally, she pooped. And we clapped, and I flushed her turd down the toilet and wiped her ass and finished washing her, and we went downstairs. And we all had dessert.

And I couldn't decide whether I deserved to win some kind of award for parental patience and support, or whether I deserved to be committed.