A Day in the Life

Yesterday, as I was getting ready to so somewhere (of course), Phaedra came to me repeating, “stinky,” over and over. She also said the word, “potty,” mixed in there several times, but by the smell of her, I knew it was way too late to rush her to the potty. I got out a diaper and wipes, and as soon as I had her diaper open and was tipping her little bottom upwards so I could deal with the mess below, she starts to wet. Oh. That’s why she was saying “potty.”

I quickly fold the poopy diaper back over her bottom to try to soak up her little stream. Phaedra is whining about the potty, the “pink” potty, to be specific (the little Dora potty seat that sits on the big potty that I got out the night before because I was tired of holding on to her the whole time she sits and goofs off on the potty. She was tired of me holding on to her, too. She’s been telling me, “Let go,” lately and holding herself up on the potty, but I get so nervous watching her distractedly swing around on the thing that I just know any second she’ll plunge right down into the water) because she was trying to tell me all along that she wanted to go on the potty. Only a few drops leaked onto the floor; I was fortunate in that. But some of it had pooled precariously on the tabs of the diaper. Just as I was very seriously telling Phaedra to stay there and don’t move so I could go get a towel and imagining the horrors of what I would have to deal with if she didn’t, Eleanor wanders in. Thank goodness for older children! “Eleanor!” I say while still holding on to Phaedra’s legs, “will you please go into the laundry room and find me a dirty towel, quick, quick?” Let’s be honest, I know that somewhere in that mountain of laundry lurks several dirty towels for her to choose from. And I have to throw in the “quick, quick,” to try to stress to her the urgency of the situation, even though I know she’ll take her sweet time the same way she does any other time I try to rush her.

I clean up the real mess of the situation while Eleanor searches the laundry room. By the time I have Phaedra all cleaned up, Eleanor is saying she can’t find a towel, and then a second later says she got one and brings it to me. I wipe the slightly wet spot on the floor with the towel, and then I go over it with a baby wipe for good measure (let’s just pretend it was a disinfecting wipe, which is what I would have used if I had a body double who could walk over and get one while I dealt with Phaedra). I check Phaedra’s clothes to find that I really lucked out: they aren’t wet at all. So, before I put her new diaper on, I ask her if she still wants to go potty on the potty. Her answer is an emphatic yes, “Pink one.”

She toddles off to my bathroom while I put the diaper in the trash and the towel back in the laundry, and I run to catch up with her. I put the pink seat cover on the seat, position Phaedra on it, and I turn to the sink because I am dying to wash my hands. When I turn back around, Phaedra is saying, “Uh-oh,” with pee dripping down her leg and all over the toilet seat. The Dora potty seat has this lip at the front which might make sense if it was a boy potty seat, but everything about this seat screams girl. Why, why, why do they put those things on a potty seat for a girl?!! They act as deflector shields, making it nearly impossible for a little girl to get it into the potty. I never would have bought it if I had known it would do that! We have a Garfield one somewhere in the garage that doesn’t have the lip. We’ll see if I can find it and convince Phae it’s just as good as the “pink one.”

I wipe up all the wetness I can see on her leg and the toilet seat, and since I don’t have time to put her in the bath, I tell her to stay there while I run to get the baby wipes, a mommy’s best friend. When I get back to her, I see that her wiggling must have caused that blessed Dora seat to shift, revealing more wetness that had landed on the toilet seat. The next thing that happened was one of those moments you see in slow motion yet are powerless to stop from happening. Phaedra reaches down to dip several of her fingers into the puddle on the toilet seat, declares, “taste,” and quickly puts the fingers into her mouth.

Now, if you aren’t shouting, “No!!!!!!!!” while you’re reading this, you’re doing a lot better than I was at that moment. Everything after that is all a blur of lecturing about not putting hands in the mouth until they are washed after going potty and me cleaning child and bathroom.

We eventually did make it out the door.

So, how was your day?