All By Myself

I grew up in a medium-sizish house with two parents and two cats and four brothers.  And one bathroom.  Yes, one bathroom for all seven of us (thankfully,the cats used other facilities).  It wasn't usually a problem, except for when we were coming home from one of those long "hey let's go on a drive" outings, and we all had to go.  We would start calling dibs on the bathroom as soon as we entered the neighborhood, but all bets were off when we pulled in the driveway.  As soon as the station wagon slowed down in the driveway, the doors were flung open and children flew out and raced like mad for the bathroom.  We all knew that, dibs aside, whoever was able to slam the bathroom door shut first was the luckiest.  The rest of us would line up in the hallway, hopping or crossing our legs, and wait.  And holler at the one in the bathroom to hurry.  Hurry!

Occasionally we would have other bathroom problems.  I'm fighting the urge to use the words congestion or constipation here.  Sometimes someone would be in the bathroom for a long time.  Sometimes a really long time.  Little kids can only wait so long, you know.  If it went on too long - like more than two or three minutes - I remember pressing my ear up against to door to listen to what was going on in there.  sooner or later, I would hear evidence of my suspicions, which gave me license to tattle.  "Mom!  He's reading in there!"  Reading in the bathroom, whether it was a book or the newspaper (usually the funny pages), was strictly verboten.

When I was in junior high, oh happy day, we got a second toilet installed.  Please note that I do not mention the bathroom, just the toilet.  This is because there was no bathroom, just the toilet.  The toilet was installed where the bathroom would eventually be, and there were two walls around it made up from a bedroom wall and the cement side of the basement.  Part of the third wall was made up of a furnace, a water heater, and a washing machine.  But there was no wall between the toilet and the hallway.  And not enough of a partition to screen the toilet-sitter from anyone coming down the stairs.  This all meant that if one really, really had to go, and one were sure of a quick finish, one might be able to furtively take care of business while keeping an ear out for footfalls on the stairs.  It was risky until the rest of the walls were erected.

Now, I live comfortably in a larger-sizish house with three bathrooms.  It's nice to have more bathrooms.  One is shared by the five - oops now only four - boys living downstairs.  The upstairs bath is shared by the girl and the twins and everyone who is upstairs during the day.  The last bathroom is mine.  I mean, it's the master bath, accessible only by going through my room and then my closet.  It is used by me and the man... and anyone else who discovers that the other bathrooms are full.

The little ones use it quite often, especially now.  The twins learned that they can stand up at the toilet.  Fortunately (seriously!) they have pretty accurate aim.  They have also learned that they can take care of business at the same time.  Wonders!  Again, good aim.  They don't even play games like crossing swords when they are in there.  I'm glad.  But we did have to draw the line recently when Georgie decided to share toilet time with Angel, who was sitting properly as a girl should.  He thought that if he could go tandem with Freddie, then sharing with Angel would also be no problem.  Not so.  She ended up soaked up and down, and madder than a wet hen.  Not that I've ever seen any of our wet hens mad, but that's beside the point.

Now I tell the little people that there are some things we should do alone.  When anyone sits on the toilet, they are now perfectly capable of doing it solo.  I remind the twins on a regular basis that she can "do this all by herself."  And when she tries to poke her head in on one of the twins in the bathroom, she hears, "He can do this all by himself."  I say it often enough I've adopted it for myself.

When Mother Nature comes a-calling and I dash into my bathroom, I can be assured of having seven seconds or less of peace.  Then, for some reason, everyone needs me.  "Mom!"  "Mom!"  "He hit me!"  "I need..."  "I'm bleeding!"  "What's for dinner?"  "Where are you?!?"  Not even the bigger kids are immune from the change in the air that evidently happens when Mother goes into the bathroom.  And due to the through-the-bedroom-and-through-the-closet location of my bathroom, they can't hear me respond to their requests very well.  When the little ones do locate me, they often try to join me in the bathroom.  No, thank you.

So I've taken to issuing a standard response.  "I'm in the bathroom and I can do this all by myself!"  And then they will have to wait... while I scroll through my facebook or read a newspaper article.  Fortunately, the electronic reading material doesn't rustle when I turn pages.

Favorite Recipes

In spite of the enormous quantities of food consumed in this household, my new favorite recipes are not meant to be consumed.  Please do not eat them.  Please.

The Recipe for a Clean Mattress After an Accident

8 ounces hydrogen peroxide
2 tablespoons baking soda
a drop of dish soap

Mix it a spray bottle, spray it on the stain (works on all kinds of stains, they say), and in 5-10 minutes it should be lifting right off.  For impatient users (me), rub a bunch of borax in after about 5 minutes.  Put on your bedroom fan and leave for the day.  About the time you are dead exhausted and can't wait to get into bed, re-enter the bedroom and sigh that your bed is not made.  But the mattress looks great!  Vacuum off (yes, Trent hauled the regular vacuum onto the bed and it worked great) all the now-dry powder and ta-da!  White spot!


The Recipe For Dead Weeds

1 quart vinegar
1 teaspoon liquid dish soap
1/4 cup salt

Mix and pour into a sprayer.  Spray on weeds.  Watch them die.


And the best thing about both of the recipes is that they work.  Honest.

Dirty Diapers

I do a little bit of laundry every day.  If I didn't, our home would soon be overrun the growing mounds of dirty clothes like some very scary domestic horror show.  Maybe we ought to save ourselves a bunch of work (and money!) and start a little family nudist colony.  I digress.  It's still winter around here and much too cold to run around naked.

Today I opened the door of the washing machine and pulled out a load of diapers.  As I transferred the clean, fresh-smelling cloth diapers into the dryer, a new thought struck me.  This way my last load of cloth diapers.

I started my diapering business 20 years ago next month, and have been in nearly constant demand ever since.  I still remember those first few loads, loading the diaper pail and Jay's mesh laundry bag and the baby into our '67 Cougar to drive to the laundromat.  Good old college memories.  I have had no dearth of customers, except for one short period when we took a short break and retooled for the serving of female clientelle.  No, I've had great job security.  The chores have been constant - being on-call 24/7 - but not usually very particularly demanding.  The was always the occasional messy work emergency, but even that left plenty of spare time between jobs.

There was a time, a couple of years ago, when I had customers lined up three deep, but that has petered down to just working the night shift.  Everyone is happy and dry during the day, but Georgie has had some nighttime challenges.  When I got him dressed this morning and took off his night diaper, I realized that he had been basically dry for the past week.  Nighttime potty training is not a big deal around these parts, so I don't stress it much.  I praised him and gave him a treat - a single jelly bean, and he was thrilled.  Our trusty diaper pail was full, so I hauled it into the laundry room to wash that load of diapers.

Georgie will wear training pants with plastic pants to bed tonight.  I'm not ready to do away with his plastic pants yet - they do catch a little bit of an accident, and they make a distinctive crinkling sound that lets me know my little ones are sneaking around out of bed.

And now the diapers are clean and dry, white and fluffy.  What will I do with them, I wonder.  Use them for dust rags like my mother did with our old, tattered cloth diapers?  Cleaning the car cloths?  They make great stain-appliers when I am refinishing furniture, but I have an awful lot of them.  Anyone interested in a big, twin-sized batch of plain-Jane, old-fashioned cloth diapers?

Homemade Laundry Detergent

I made laundry detergent today.  By myself.  At home.  I feel so green!

I used the directions from this website, and it was just as easy as she said it would be.  I can handle a recipe with only four ingredients: a bar of soap, washing soda (which was something new, but wasn't too hard to find), borax (I usually have this on hand anyway), and water.  I bought the washing soda a while ago.  It may have even been more than a year ago.

I decided that today would be a great time to try something new.  I finished bottling peaches yesterday, and my kitchen was newly clean.  Besides, I needed to do laundry and I was out of detergent.  Like, I really needed to do laundry.  We've been having some potty accidents lately.  A little one wet the bed last night.  And we were out of toddler underwear.  O.U.T.  Out enough that I had two kids running commando today.  I really needed to do laundry.

So I grated the soap and simmered everything until smooth.  I even put in some citrus-y essential oil to make it smell nice.  Poured it into bottles and it makes a nice gel.  Then I loaded the less-than-lovely bedding into the washing machine... and found an old bottle of laundry soap hiding in the cabinet.

So I haven't tried it out yet, but at least the little ones have clean things to wear again.  I'll let you know how it works as soon as the old bottle of detergent is done.

Outings While Potty Training

Potty training is serious business.  You stay at home and take care of business.  It can be tricky enough that I don't dare much to leave the room, let alone the house.  I suppose you can be rather lackadaisical about the whole affair, like a mother I heard about recently who went out to lunch with her potty-training girls and their potties.  On the other hand, you could be like a lady I knew years ago who lined up babysitters for her older children while she solely focused on the potty trainee.  Whatever works for you and stays within the bounds of common decency!

We have been doing well enough to venture out of our house a few times recently.  At first, it was just driving the elementary school carpool.  We went potty just before leaving, and hurried back to the pots as soon as we walked in the door. Over time, the twins learn how to stay dry for longer periods.  Hallelujah!

We spent the entire morning with my dad the other day.  Even though it was not as familiar as our home, the little guys stayed dry the whole time.  I made sure to take the to the bathroom on a regular basis, and they did great.  Happy day.

And this morning, we went grocery shopping.  That's unnerving with potty-trainers.  One of the more difficult things I've done with little children involves emergency restroom trips (for them or for pregnant me!) with shopping carts full of groceries and other children.  That's the stuff Mommy nightmares are made of.

We went potty just before going to the store and made it through all our shopping (about an hour's worth).  After getting through the checkout and safely into the parking lot, I asked David to load the grocery bags into the van while I took the twins back in for a potty break.

All three of us crowded into a claustrophobic stall, and I boosted Freddie onto the toilet.  Big commercial split toilet seats are rough on little bottoms.  It's so easy to tip into the split, or be pinched by the seat, or even fall in the water.  Just saying.  Georgie got bored, and it was all I could do to keep him from touching the icky floor, pulling out toilet paper, or crawling under the partition into the next stall - all while balancing Freddie so he didn't fall in.

Do you know what happens when a little boy is startled while whizzing?  Let's just say that aim... is non-existent.

Georgie flushed the toilet while Freddie was sitting on it - twice.  Freddie was terrified of the noise, trying desperately to jump onto my head, crying, and still dribbling.  It was lovely.  Then Georgie still needed to go, so I was balancing him on the nasty split toilet seat while trying to keep Freddie with us in the stall.  Finally, we were done.  They both hated the flusher, and were anxious to get away from the scary toilet.

I lifted Georgie off the toilet - and the automatic toilet flushed itself again.  Both boys jumped, panic-stricken, and couldn't get away from the alarming toilet monster fast enough.

Those deafening, self-flushing toilets are enough to scare your pants off!

Potty Training, Naptime Edition

The potty training is going pretty well around these parts.  The twins are managing to stay dry all morning, with regular reminders to go potty.  The afternoon is almost always dry as well, but we have an occasional accident in the evening.  That might have something to do with Mom being busy, distracted, and/or tired at the end of the day.  They are starting to run to the potty when they need to go, and announcing it by saying, "Yay!  Fed (or Doge - whichever boy just went) potty!" and wanting us to cheer for them.

Staying dry at naptime is a different story altogether.  They don't yet.  I put them in diapers when they head to bed.

The problem is that their idea of naptime and mine are vastly different.  We have lunch, change into diapers, read a story, sing a song, maybe have a cup of warm milk, and snuggle in the rocking chairs in the twins' room.  When they are looking calm and drowsy, we tuck them gently into bed.  We steal softly out of the room and tie the door shut behind us.  Go ahead and mention the fire marshal or child protective service -  I will readily admit to locking my children in their bedroom.  This is only just until they are quiet, however (with both their parents listening in the next room), and then I open the door.  The problem is that it takes an hour or more for them to get quiet.

They shake the bed, they climb on the furniture, they throw all the clothes out of their drawers, they pull the drawers out of the dresser, they empty the closet, they jump, they fight, they sing songs.  They do everything BUT go to sleep.

So maybe we are putting them down for a nap too early?  Nope.  This is the routine, no matter how late in the afternoon they take a nap.  And maybe they are getting too old for a nap?  Nope.  If left napless, they will be unbearably grouchy all afternoon long, then collapse into their dinner plates at the table and sleep until I'd like to be putting myself to bed.  They do take a good nap - once they go to sleep.

This naptime/playtime routine has worked fairly well, if noisily, until now.  Now they are potty training, and don't like to be wet.  So they take off the diapers.  Oh, and they haven't gotten the hang of depositing their solids into the potty yet, so they hold it - until they get their diapers on.

So whilst playing and jumping and generally not napping, they pull the diapers off.  And then play in the poop.  It's been a disaster for several days now, walking into the room after it gets quiet only to find a stinky mess and naked boys.  Argh.

I've tried to get them to poop in the potty.  We've stayed on the potties for quite a long time just before naps, trying to get the business done.  I've tried checking on them every few minutes to try to avoid the stripping.  I've tried waiting until they were asleep in my arms before putting them to bed.  Tonight, they are zipped into footie pajamas with the zipper pull tightly safety-pinned at the top.  We'll see how that goes.

Nighty-night, my little stinkers!  Mama loves you.  Please leave your clothing and diapers in the ON position.  Thank you.

The Pah-tee, Part Two

I neglected to say that we keep our potties right out in the living room, so everyone can enjoy our training successes.

Aren't they adorable little potties?  Now all who enter can know what we have been up to these days.

Actually, we put them there for two reasons:  it is more convenient to get two mini-bums to sit when the pots are right there; and three little people in the bathroom at the same time (Angel has to go if they do!) is just way too many.  One is on the toilet, one is on the potty, one is checking to see how long the toilet paper is, then someone has to splash in the toilet while it is being sat upon, and of course the cupboards and drawers simply must be explored.  Too much adventure.

We like our chamber pots in miniature to be admired.  Yeah, that's it.

Body Training

It's potty time!  Pah-tee!  Yup, folks, get out your hats and balloons and confetti.  We're having us a pot-tee!  Even better - we're having two potties!  Yes!

Whew.  That many exclamation points makes me tired.  I'm not naturally that perky, so it takes a lot of energy to pretend.  Back to your regularly scheduled programming now...

Before the twins turned two, they started learning about the toilet.  I change their diapers on a pad on the bathroom counter, with one little guy on the pad and the other little guy around my ankles.  Angel often has to join the party, where she remembers that she "gots to go."  The twins ignored her, then watched, then got curious about what she was doing, sitting over there.  Georgie was the first to want to sit on the toilet - and tinkled immediately.  After that I would put him on during a diaper change if he asked and he always tinkled.  Pretty soon Freddie wanted to try, too.

For their second birthday, I bought a matched set of training potties.  I knew it was far too soon to really potty train, but the three of them were starting to fight over who got to sit on the toilet.  Now we have seats for everyone - Angel on the toilet and the twins on their little potties.  Here is a reminder of a really bad potty party picture, for your viewing enjoyment:

We'd go potty for a few days, and then the novelty would wear off.  When my little guys started whining as I put them on the potty, I knew they weren't ready.  I cleaned up the potties and put them in the bathroom cabinet.  After a few weeks, one of the twins would find them, drag them out and demand to go potty.  We'd try again for a few days, then put them away again.

A couple of weeks ago, I thought we'd pull them out again, just to see what would happen.  It's still a bit early to potty-train boys, but they are asking for it, so I guess that means they are getting ready.  Some of my boys have potty-trained easily and quickly (a week or two), while for others it was a long (try over a year!) and arduous process. 

For the first little while, I give treats for the sitting.  Then you have to accomplish something on the pot to get a treat.  The older kids get a treat too, if they help a little one potty successfully.  Now I just remind them to go somewhat often, and they stay mostly dry during the day.  They want me to cheer for them and clap my hands.  Yay!  I'd much rather have little legs sticking out of training pants than change diapers.  

AND they are starting to go when they need to.  AND they are starting to figure out the solids as well.  Yay!

It's worth the effort of using exclamation marks.

And the progress is worth dealing with the accidents.  Like the one this afternoon where Freddie mostly made it to the potty before he pooped.  And the one yesterday where Georgie pooped little pellets all across two rooms.  And the one tonight where three little people were screaming in the bathtub because of the floaters Freddie made,  Good times.

Freddie calls it "body training."  I guess that works.  Happy day.  We're having a potty!