Pee Puddles and Toilet Paper Truffles

Today has been an interesting day. Well, it's only late afternoon right now so perhaps I should say that today has been an interesting day, so far.

After reading about playing dollhouse several times in the last few weeks on 18underoneroof, I got motivated to drag out our garage sale dollhouse to the playroom. We set some of the dollhouse furniture up and played for awhile. Milla was agitated because the little girl figurine kept falling off the potty. Reiss was insisting that we make the little vacuum cleaner work. I continued placing little pieces of furniture in the house and wondering how much lead might be in the paint used on all of it. The stuff is pretty darn old.

After a bit of playing appropriate dollhouse play, they both reverted to something I am now certain James should never have taught them. They both stood inside the dollhouse and began to shake it furiously with Reiss exclaiming, "Earthquake!" And after a few seconds of that, dollhouse time came to an end with furniture all over the playroom floor.

We are still potty-training Reiss and today has not exactly been a stellar day for successes in the bowl. Reiss normally does not tell us basic needs or wants and one can only imagine how difficult this makes potty-training. In addition to taking him for routine visits to the bathroom, we remind him to tell us when he needs to pee or poop. He'll say, "Are you peein'?" or "Are you poopin'?" And that's his way of telling us. However, here lately, it has turned into somewhat of a game for him and he sometimes says it when he doesn't mean it.

This morning after a few visits to the bathroom he came and told me, "Are you peein'?" So we hurry, hurry, hurried to the bathroom and he had done a tiny tinkle in his Elmo underwear. He sat on the potty and didn't do anything, so we got up. Got his pants off, new underwear on, same pants put back on because the pee did not soak through the underwear to the pants, shoes on and we were ready to go. Thirty seconds - if that - later we were in the kitchen and I was starting lunch and he said, "Are you peein'?" Only this time he really, really was peein' - and puddles - literally. Had it been in the potty, it would have been one heck of a reward but as it was, I had to strip him down, put his shoes and clothes in the washer, wipe up the pee puddles on the floor, and get Reiss clean clothes to wear.

After Reiss's pee clothes had gone through a cycle in the wash, I went to put them in the dryer only to discover our next obstacle of the day. Our washer has been acting up in that it will only spin a little bit or not at all. Usually I can go in there and fiddle with the washer's tub and get it to spin. Not today. Thank goodness we have someone coming in a little while to look at it. I don't really want to get a new washer and going without during potty-training is unacceptable. I'm not being a cheapskate here by not wanting to get a new one. I would rather just use the thing until it either dies or explodes. In the last thirteen years, we have had four washers. FOUR!!! Part of the reason - I'm sure - we have to keep buying them is because every time one goes bad, we have gone and gotten the bottom of the line, dirt-cheapest model Sears has to offer. Not this next time. If this one is bad now or whenever it goes bad, we are spendin' some money! Seriously...is anything made to last anymore? Well, it may be worth mentioning that we have had the very same dryer all thirteen years and only had one very minor problem with it in all that time.

After lunch, which took about an hour and fifteen minutes to make with all the stuff going on, we went back for another bathroom break. Milla wanted to play with the toilet paper but instead of obliging her with the entire roll, I gave her one little sheet - you know, one little perforated square. She wiped the bathroom drawers with it and then pretended like she was blowing her nose. Meanwhile, Reiss sat on the potty and we sang the ABC's, The Itsy-Bitsy Spider, Mary Had a Little Lamb, Milla Had a Little Lamb, Reiss Had a Little Lamb, and Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I looked over at Milla and she had taken her toilet paper square and wadded it up into a ball. She was looking at it and studying it and then POP! Into her mouth it went! Yummy....What fun it was fishing all that soggy toilet paper out of her mouth and scraping her tongue with my fingernail to get the leftover remnants. Oh, the joys of parenting. No job for pay can offer these kind of benefits.