Day Number One or Number One Day?

Today is my official first day back to work for the school year. To clarify, I did not take on a teaching job. My patience has usually been exhausted at home by 7:12am, so putting me in front of a classroom of children until 3pm would either result in a sharp decline in our children's test scores or a series of assault charges for me.

They don't use back-to-back episodes of Thomas the Train to torture badly behaved mommies in prison, do they?

Rather than teaching, I'm back in the grind of watching children during the day so that I'm able to stay home with my own kids. My summer schedule only required me to watch one boy twice a week, so I am having to adjust to the return of a more traditional work week as well as the noise that comes with four children all under the age of four.

Noise may not be the appropriate term, however.  When all four of them are yelling at once, I find that the best tactic for mental survival is to listen for key words or phrases.  Remember the feeling when you'd nod off during school and be suddenly jerked back to reality by the sound of your name?  This is much like that, except instead of sleeping I'm in energy saving mode, and instead of snapping back to reality because I heard my name, it was because my ears picked up on something very specific.

Cael's Guilty Mug Shot

"Cael just peed on the floor!"

(This is the point at which I'd like to fire off an expletive-laced rant. You know, the kind that would have gotten me fired from that ill-suited teaching job. But alas, this is a family blog, so you can just picture me quivering with a pile of my hair on the floor.)

"Cael did WHAT?!"

"He peed on the floor!", his friend shouted.

"Cael, did you pee on the floor?"

"No."

"So who peed on the floor?"

"He did!"  Cael pointed at his friend and lovingly blamed him for the puddle of urine on the carpet.

"Was it you?"

"No, it was Cael!"  (I believed this little guy from the start-- he's not one to lie and my son isn't one to fess up.)

"Cael!  DID YOU PEE ON THE FLOOR?"

"Yes." 

(This is the point at which I give myself a firm pat on the back for instilling in my son so many good values like honesty, loyalty to friends and good bathroom habits.)

First Day in Underpants - November 2010

I couldn't figure out why he'd do something like this.  Since the day I gave up on training underpants and tossed a pair of the real cloth ones on him, he's been the picture of potty reliability. He has no accidents, is always able to predict his need to go and has never expressed any interest in public indecency.  Well, at least not for himself.  In fact, I understood his desire to cover up his tracks much more than his interest in relieving himself on our low-grade indoor-outdoor berber.

 After being forced to clean up his mess, a punishment that does not at all fit the crime since he is incapable of sufficiently scrubbing the carpet with enough force to get it clean, he sat by himself for awhile to think about his actions.  He endured several interrogations to determine why, oh why, he would empty his bladder on the floor, but all ended with little more than "I don't know".



I gave up and let it go.  I know (and you do, too) this is hardly his first questionable behavior and certainly won't be his last.  But just as I had this thought and closed the wet carpet chapter, Cael paused while eating his chicken bites at lunch and said,

"Mommy, I'm sorry I peed on the floor."

"I know you are.  I just don't know why you would do that." 

"Because peeing is funny."

"Not when you do it on the carpet, it isn't!"

"It is when people laugh, Mommy!"

So there you have it.  My son whipped it out and peed on the floor for a few measly giggles.  We're all about being funny in our house, but I thought we'd taught him better about what it's worth.  I guess I can be grateful he's three and not twenty-three, although if I wind up in prison for assault and he's incarcerated for indecent exposure, we could probably share a cell.

A cell phone, that is.  The last thing I need in jail is to step in his urine.  Apparently he has a problem with peeing on the floor...