"Uh-oh Mommy"

If you have not potty-trained a boy, you may not know the importance of the phrase "point it down." This concept is instrumental in order to protect your bathroom floor, walls, and, well... all of your bathroom. Some parents of boys opt for the stand-and-train method, but since 99% of the world's toilets (including our own) are well above the height for this to even be a possibility right now, we went the sit-and-train route.

As with all aspects of parenting our son, we need to repeat everything several hundreds of times. The phrase "point it down" is used at just about every potty break, and usually, he does pretty well getting the pee in the potty. Today, however, Mommy heard "uh-oh" from the bathroom, and knew that something that came out of him and was meant to be in the toilet probably wasn't.

Before I continue, let me set the backdrop here.
#1: Mommy is cooking chicken on the grill outside.
#2: 18-month old sister is extremely (borderline psychotically) attached to Mommy these days.


Mommy has just run back in after flipping the chicken on the grill. She hears son say "uh-oh" from the bathroom and knows that even though she does not want to, she needs to learn the truth and deal with it. Upon entering the bathroom, she notices a sea of liquid on the floor (something that does happen from time to time) but then realizes that the pee-sea is actually coming from under the basket of magazines and books. This evidence leads her to deduce that her son must have peed straight forward, or perhaps upward even, creating an arc of pee that drenched the entire basket on the opposite bathroom wall. Mommy lifts the basket up and out of the bathroom, but since baby sister has followed her in there, the dripping wet pee basket is lifted directly over sister's head. Mommy then wrestles herself from sister's grasp in order to go grab paper towels and returns to find sister standing directly in the middle of pee-pond, staring at her brother, still sitting on the toilet.

As I begin explaining that everything in the basket will have to be thrown away, all of Mommy and Daddy's magazines and all of his own books, he cries and begs me to "clean" his books and not throw them away.

Once the basket is tossed and floor is cleaned, Mommy recalls that she is also cooking dinner! Again, wrenching the death grip of her 18-month old daughter's fingers from her legs, she rushes outside to salvage the burning chicken, and in her haste, touches the grate and sears her fingers.

2 hours later -- I kid you not -- he does it again. This time, however, "It's okay, Mommy. It only got all over the floor."