Tag: Birthday

Potting training is a literal pile of shit.

Well, this weekend is going to be excluded from my memoirs.

Aut woke up on Saturday morning with a trucker-sized dump in his pants and the husband drew the short straw. It’s nearly impossible to sleep an extra two hours while your child watches inappropriate television shows in your bed if the child smells like poop. Eventually one of the parents has to sack up and change the diaper, and whomever gets stuck doing it ends feeling exempt from doing anything else childcare related for the rest of the day.

Usually we grumble about how terrible and inhumane it is that our child unleashes that kind of fury upon us first thing in the morning, but eventually we get over it and go have coffee and bagel sandwiches to make everything okay again. Not this Saturday. This Saturday, the husband marches up the stairs and declares, with the confidence of a Custer before his last stand, that he has changed his final diaper. THIS IS BULLSHIT. I am done! 

To be clear (and because he reads these posts and immediately sends me all caps text messages when he thinks I’ve painted him unfairly), I was not against the potty training. But I was committed in the same way you commit to a going on a diet with a friend when you can tell her entire commitment depends on you. You say yes, you have some fruit for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and by dinner you know that her self esteem will have risen just enough that you can both face plant into some tacos and Corona…light. I made some off-handed comment about how we would have to go to Target and then we’d have to pay attention to our kid all.day.long, and none of those things deterred him. Never again was he going to wipe shit from another human ass. So off we went to Target.

When Aut was about 18 months old we were those asshole parents who bought like 14 training potties because our gifted child was going to potty train himself before he could speak and we wanted to make sure he had the most appropriate, butt contouring surface on which to do that. So we didn’t have to get a potty at Target. Whew. What we did have to get were two packages of training pants– one with Mickey Mouse Club ALL OVER THEM, and another with all the different super hero logos.

Rather than read anything or ask any experts, we pieced together a “plan” based on hearsay and random bits of information we were pretty sure we got from other people with potty trained kids. Then we gave the kid the rundown.

These are big boy pants. Do not shit in these pants. Do not pee in these pants. Doing that is tantamount to shitting on Mickey Mouse’s head. Do you understand? If you shit on Mickey’s head, he’ll tell Santa and then your whole year will be ruined. 

Then we created an entirely too complicated rewards program that was supposed to span the entire weekend. For two days our two year old would stare at the most coveted toy in all of Target and somehow that would motivate him to not shit on Mickey.

Putting aside how fucking miserable it was to explain to a 2-year-old FOR TWO DAYS why he couldn’t have the toy on the counter, everything about our “plan” was flawed. For starters, we went through six pair of big boy underwear in under an hour. Three times we sat him on the potty, read, sang, did humiliating potty dances, only to put his undies back on him and have him immediately pee down his own leg. And insist that that was not what was happening. (Or insist that while his pants were wet, his big boy undies were, in fact, still dry.)

On Saturday night, we were frayed and bitter. I drank an entire bottle of Rose, got into an argument with my husband about something that probably didn’t exist, and then stormed up the stairs to go to bed. Sunday would be a new day.

That night I did have the good sense to consult with my friend Lauren, who did her best not be painfully smug about her gracefully potty trained daughter who basically shares a birthday with Aut. She also had the good sense not tell me all at once what douche canoes we were being by assuming our kid would be successful in a day. (She let those texts come to me over an entire weekend, culminating with a Sunday evening text that began “at the risk of sounding like a dick…”) She suggested instant gratification, which made sense. Come morning, I was giving my kid M&Ms for breakfast if that’s what it was going to take.

And come Sunday did. Kid slept til nine, woke up dry (in an overnight diaper, I don’t have a hole in my head), and we immediately did that dumb parent thing where you get SUPER EXCITED about something that makes young, single people think you should be shot.

YAY FOR BIG BOY PANTS! YAY FOR ANOTHER LIFE-RUINING DAY OF WATCHING YOU PISS ON YOURSELF WHILE WE CHEER FOR YOU AND GIVE YOU CANDY! THIS IS SO FUN! CLAPS ALL AROUND! YOU’RE GOING TO HARVARD! 

He was stoked. He peed on command and I told him to go tell Pups and then he could have one whole M&M. He went to the kitchen and in the time it took to walk the six feet from the bathroom to the kitchen he actually couldn’t remember why he was getting an M&M. We almost had a meltdown because he thought the husband was denying him his M&M, when all he was trying to do was get him to say “I peed, therefore I get M&M.” You know CONNECTING THE FUCKING DOTS. Fail.

Thirty minutes later, I asked him if he needed to potty and then watched him make The Face and turn red while telling me no. He told me “no” while simultaneously shitting his pants. In front of me.

The husband and I kept having to talk over Aut’s head, reminding each other to keep it positive.

Don’t yell! Encourage his progress! Clap! I know you’re holding a cloth Superman baggy of human feces, but don’t let him know you hate him! SMILE! Ask him if he needs to read the potty book for inspiration.

The real clencher was when we took him out in public. (I want for you to know that writing this all down makes our choices seem even worse, which I didn’t even know was possible.) We took him to a lovely baptism/birthday garden party at a friend’s house. He waited about 12 minutes before peeing down the front of his pants. The good news is that it didn’t get on their floor because it all pooled in his shoes. So, silver lining.

I immediately grabbed a pull up, went to the back door, and yelled across two quiches, a nice quinoa salad, about about 30 people at my husband that our child wet his pants and whizzed in his shoes and I was calling uncle. The kid was putting on a pull up and we could talk about this later. Like in a year.

To seal our defeat and humiliation, upon arriving home we had to give our kid the toy. Totally undeserved, but he had no idea. He probably thinks peeing in his shoes was bonus points that fast-tracked him to winning the game.

Then we revised our strategy.

This morning we dropped him off at daycare with a pack up pull ups and nicely asked the daycare to potty train him.

 

 

 

 

I have Klout. Seriously.

It’s only a matter of time before I leave you all for something bigger, better, brighter. For years I’ve toiled away on this blog, exposing my deepest insecurities and most intimate thoughts– for what? Your fleeting admiration? A few comments? The occasional like? It’s not a life I’m cut out for living. But getting free shit? That’s a life I was born for.

That’s right. I got a free thermometer. Braun sent it to me because I am so mather facking good at this whole mothering thing. I’m an influencer. (That means that right now I am infiltrating your brain and making you do things without even knowing it.) No, really. As it turns out, no one cares about me. All I ever needed to do to become popular on the internet was have a baby. If I’d gotten knocked up at 16, I probably could have skipped college, gotten in early on the Facebook thing and had a best seller by the time I could legally buy cigarettes. Wish I would have known. Stupid education.

But I didn’t. And it looks like it may not matter because even with that useless college degree, I got a free thermometer. The beauty of my free thermometer is two fold. First, if you’ve ever had to take a baby’s temperature, or stuck anything in your own asshole, you know that it’s not fun or easy. (At least not all the time.) As it turns out, as much as I adore the in-ear thermometer, baby don’t dig. My new, free, thermometer works by swiping it across your forehead. I have no idea how well it works on my child, but the two or three hundred times I’ve taken my own temperature, it’s been downright blissful. Plus when I thought I was dying, the hubs seemed to be able to swipe it across my forehead with similar ease. The second thing about my free thermometer (besides that it was FREE and incredibly validating) is that it’s a gateway thermometer. This is going to be my new life. Today it’s a free thermometer, tomorrow, who knows.

I have some ideas.

As many of you may not know, I have a very big birthday coming up. It’s divisible by ten and three. As someone with so much influence and savvy, it makes perfect sense that brands would be clamoring to send me the top items on my list. For free.

Why? I will tell you why. The publicity. The access to impressional folks such as yourself. I’m going to build a birthday empire. (DO YOU HEAR ME, BRANDS? WHEN YOU SEND ME FREE THINGS I WILL PEDAL THEM! I AM SHAMELESS! I WILL SAY WHATEVER YOU WANT!) Do you see what I’ve done for Braun? Do you see how many fractions of a thermometer I’ve sold?

So here’s the list.

All-Clad: You wonderful, wonderful stainless steel people. I need a 12 quart stainless pot. It’s a black-eyed pea emergency. If I have to make New Year’s peas in that shit hole pot for another year, I won’t need luck, I’ll need a good lawyer. You send me the pot and you’ll get access to all these people. And I’ll post my black-eyed peas with some hash tags. Sound like a plan?

Wusthof: I don’t usually do well appealing to Eastern Europeans. Something about my humor not translating. But let’s cross the bridge of friendship and hug overlooking Free Shit Lake. I need some good knives. Not a whole set, but a few good ones. I could have gone to Henkel, but I came to you. Because I know you want in on this. Danke.

Whole Foods: Truthfully, I’m a little offended that you haven’t reached out to me. I’m from your hometown. We went to high school together. I am loyal. I never complain about you. I don’t care where you source your fruits from. Yay Colombia! Yipee Peru! I think that a few well-placed gift cards could really boost your brand. And by well placed I mean in my palm. (Not to be confused with palm oil. Bad. Unless you stock products that use it. In which case we will overlook a few dead orangutans.)

Amazon: I have no idea what you plan on doing with all those newspapers, but while you’re figuring that out, why don’t you boost your online sales by throwing this gal some gift cards? I’m Prime. (Like actually, I am a Prime member.) I’m a mom. I’m hip. YOU CANNOT GO WRONG WITH THIS INVESTMENT. I will blog all about the things I am going to buy. And then when I buy them… I will post PHOTOS. You read that right. PHOTOS.

Design Within Reach: You are not within reach and we both know it, but you are within reach of the dozens of people who read this blog and with a simple gift of a Herman Miller Eames Lounger (black with cherry), you could boost your sales by a staggeringly insignificant amount. AND you’d be my friend. And I promise to start every blog post in 2014 with, “as I sit here in my Eames lounger from DWR…” 

Let’s start there. I’m not saying I’m not open to other brands, but I don’t want to open the floodgates too quickly. There’s enough of my 30th birthday to go around.

Happy Birthday, me. And thank you in advance, All-Clad, Wusthof, Amazon, Whole Foods, and Design Within Reach. Gems, all of you.

(In all seriousness, though, I’d like to thank @Klout and @KloutPerks and the good folks at Braun (@BraunTherms) for the free thermometer. It really is a nifty little gadget that I do recommend– whether you’re a baby or have a baby.)