All good stories should begin with, “I was late for work and we’re trying to potty-train our daughter…”
This morning after breakfast I sat Baby Harbat down on the potty with a book and instructions to go poo poo. Since our bathroom windows are always open, I imagine the neighbor is getting tired of hearing potty talk at quarter to seven each morning. BH had none of it, and was constantly getting up, singing, and running around airing out her butt. Fine, she won’t go. So I got ready for work, an important and busy day ahead of me. I’m running late already and just putting on my shoes when my wife tells me she needs to be changed. But wait, I think, you just put her diaper on?
Cut to Baby Harbat walking down the hall in an odd bow-legged gait, her nose wrinkled up. “When you have to go potty,” I remind her, “you have to tell us.” After the twenty foot walk from her room to ours, I see she’s got something on her leg. And her shorts. And her shoes. And it smells very bad. That’s right, a Stage Five diaper blowout. I carry her back to her room like I’m handling a canister of active plutonium, and my wife and I begin Operation Washdown. I notice that BH has it on her shoes, and it has been ground into the rug in her room. Pardon me, sir, do you have any Rug Poop-On? But of course!
Lemme just give new parents a word of advice. If you get queasy at the smells of old cheese, sour meat, cesspools, low tide, roadkill, or that black liquefied stuff at the back of the fridge drawer, take your baby back to the hospital right now. Trade it in for a coupon for a free car wash, or a subscription to Good Housekeeping. Because from the first day you bring your baby home until the day he or she is fully toilet trained and helping with chores (around age 15 or so I hear), you’ll find yourself up to your elbows in the most foul nastiness you can imagine. And it will always happen when you are late for work and wearing your nicest dress clothes. I guarantee it.
Writer, architect, father, husband.
It's true. If I had been the one taking her to work yesterday, it probably wouldn't have happened ;P