Have Toilet Seat, Will Travel

One of the unspoken secrets of parenthood is that toddlers are a source of unremitting hilarity.

Of course, you can't laugh at them, you'd give them a complex. Even when I laugh at one of Sydney's silly antics, something she is doing silly on purpose, she still asks me, "why are you laughing?" To laugh at her when she endeavors to offer her own serious opinion, or when she is stomping around in the kitchen in her "dancing dress" to Elvis Costello's "Red Shoes", or when she suddenly bursts into tears and declares she doesn't want the Christmas Tree because it isn't Christmas yet, would surely be classified as child abuse, so we spend alot of time with our hands over our mouths or with our backs turned, trying to hold in a serious case of the giggles.

And now we've got toilet humor. Sorry, folks.

Early in Sydney's potty training career, she was feeling confident enough one day to do the whole operation by herself. So without telling her father, she climbed up the stairs, went into the bathroom, took off her diaper, and climbed up onto the big potty, only to fall straight through the hole and ended up screaming her head off, whereupon Daddy found her half submerged, her shirt wet and her little arms trying to keep her butt out of the water. Talk about trying not to laugh in the face of serious crisis.

This incident has marked Sydney, so even though she is perfectly toilet trained she is afraid of the Toilet, i.e. the thing that grown ups sit on. She still insists that Daddy teach her to pee standing up, a request I am continuously vacillating on, on the one hand telling her that Daddy will teach her when she's six (an age I've placed a lot of arbitrary milestones on) and on the other telling her that girls pee sitting down. She countered the last one the other day by responding that she wants to be a boy.

"um," I said.

It's a frequent response of mine, these days. I mean really. What is the correct parental guidance response to a request for an early toddler sex change?

In any event, to combat the problem of the Big Evil Toilet, the only kind they ever have in shopping malls, gas stations, or restaurants, we've started carrying with us in place of the diaper bag a toddler's toilet seat.

So there I am, in a small Co-op with my hilarious sidekick, who is constantly chatting up a storm, running around the aisles, and generally making herself (and me) conspicuous to all the other shoppers, when she announces at the top of her lungs that she needs to poop. We get out the bag with the potty seat in it, rush to the bathroom, and get set up, whereupon she announces that actually she doesn't need to go. So we undo the operation and go back to our half filled shopping cart, where five minutes later she announces once again that she needs to poop. So we run back to the bathroom and this time we get something for our troubles. Thoroughly frazzled by now, I go back to my shopping, but Sydney is done, and she runs around and around screeching delightedly. I decide that I'd best be done too, so we go to the register and unload the wagon. Sydney puts on her Helpful Toddler Hat and decides she can push the wagon back to where we got it from, and starts pushing it in a random direction, heading toward a display of bananas. I'm in the middle of paying. "Honey," I say, in that distracted parental way, trying to keep one eye on her and one eye on the debit machine, "please be careful where you're going."

Sydney stops, stares at me, and then in her loudest, most incredulous voice, cries, "What!??"

Whereupon the cashier, the bagger, and half the store burst out laughing.

That's Sydney, my little comedian.

Toiletry

Saturday began like any other day. Sydney went down for her "nap"-- otherwise known as her private two hour sing-a-long, at around 2, and at around 4:30 I came back into the room to find her sitting on the bottom of the bed with a huge grin on her face.

"I didn't sleep!" was the first excited thing she said to me, and then the real kicker, "I'm not going to wear diapers anymore because I'm a big girl!"

"Really!" I said, conveniently responding to both statements. We dutifully got out of the diaper and into underwear (recycled and much too big), and when downstairs I asked her to repeat the last part so that Daddy could hear.

"I didn't sleep!" she said.

"No, the other part," I said.

We decided to take her at her word, though we were worried, for instance, when she and I went out for an hour to hike about looking for Christmas Trees, or when we went out for a third of the day to go shopping, or what would happen when she napped.

So far, she's done it almost perfectly.

So in honor of Sydney's new journey into the world of Toilets, you should read this link. Maybe Sydney knew it was momentous day after all.

Pop, Pop, and Away

We went to town today to gather a few items and also to buy a gift for a friend of Sydney's, just turning three. Sydney's favorite place to buy gifts; The Party Store.

When you go to the Party Store, you're really there to buy balloons. So we explained that one balloon would go to Sydney, the other, to her friend.

"Okay," Sydney said, and then promptly picked out a bright, cheery orange one for herself, and a somber black one for the birthday boy.

We intervened and picked out a purple Happy Birthday balloon, and handed them out to the clerk to be filled, whereupon the balloon became about the size of Sydney and three times as wide.

"Hon," my husband said to me, "Do you think we can fit that into the car?"

We then belatedly learned from the clerk that a balloon of that size would probably deflate in 4 or 5 hours. The birthday party would be the next day.

"Fortunately," the future salesman exclaimed, "for 35 cents extra we can add a substance called Hi Float, which will make the balloon last for 24 to 36 hours!"

We had already committed ourselves to the balloon. We agreed to fill two balloons with Hi Float.

Six dollars later, we were out of the store and trying to stuff them into the back of the car when one of the balloons popped suddenly. It was the bright cheery orange one.

"Uh oh," we muttered to each other. "What should we do?"

"Syd," my husband said a few seconds later, "your balloon popped."

"Oh," she said, disinterested. She was busy looking at the pavement.

"Is that okay?" he persisted.

"Yes," she said. She was on to something else entirely.

Relieved, we stuffed the remaining balloon into the back of the car and headed to our next errand, a drugstore. Somehow, Sydney found herself in the party section of that store (is party animalism genetic?) and shouted for joy. "Bayyoons!!" she cried, and promptly pulled down a mylar helium contraption with Dora the Explorer on it.

We were now 9 dollars into helium, ribbon, mylar and rubber.

We began to wend our way home with the new balloon, the birthday balloon and our various other errands stuffed into our small Prius, when we heard another explosion in the back. The big, Hi Float Happy Birthday balloon was gone.

Two balloons down. At least we still had Dora.

Who, true to her name, decided to set out Exploring when I opened the trunk during our next stop to change a diaper. Neither Sydney nor I witnessed Dora's silent escape from the car, but she was nowhere to be found when we got home.

Fortunately Sydney had bought a wooden secondhand train. "Your balloon is gone," I explained to her as we went into the house.

"Oh," she said, rolling her train on the floor.

The train was 2 dollars. And Sydney was happy. And that was all that really mattered.

Happy Halloween

I don't think that Sydney really understood the question. After all, the past two Halloweens she's been around for, her language skills were either undeveloped or largely absent. But in any,event, whenever we asked her, she stuck with her story.

We saw several ladybugs, a spider, a couple of Batmen, one Boba Fett, a million disney princesses, a few witches, a devil, and an infant dressed up as a carrot. There were also a few nondescript costumes, mostly teenagers, dressed up in that Just Give Me the Candy kind of way. It was a warm, though windy, Halloween, and everybody seemed to be having a good time.

Oh, what did Sydney want to be for Halloween?

Spinach.