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.