That's no moon

The caring folks at Angel Soft would love for you to smile and sigh when you see this scene, rather than get your stranglin' gloves broken in, as you should:
I don't know about you, but in my house, this kind of frivolous waste would mean that toilet paper would come in homemade 5-sheet rolls, not ones long enough for a puppy to frolic across your house with.*

And I'd still watch them like a hawk.

That's with good reason-- D- has lately shown every intention of making sure I have to. After being really good with everything to do with the toilet, he's taken up the new hobby of creating a hand-crafted softball each time he needs to dab himself clean.

Let me first assure you, we aren't dealing with the cheap stuff-- this is primo extra-thick Charmin bought in a package the size of a Yaris at Costco. That makes it pretty affordable for J- to pamper herself and for me to get by with about half a square each time, but it still ain't free, and regardless, I'd like him to not grow up to be as wasteful as Americans have been conditioned to be for decades now.

We had inklings of the problem in the past few weeks when: J- found an unflushed toilet more full of TP than of water; we marveled at how often we were putting out new rolls; and when I (from the shower...) heard the toilet choking and sputtering just with the effort to swallow what D- understatedly identified as "my pee-pee".

Now, I'll acknowledge that he might come by this proclivity quite honestly, as I've always (lovingly, of course) mocked J- for believing she needs to mummify her hand in order to be clean, but I doubt this is a genetically inherited trait, so hopefully it's just a phase for him. We had a little talk about it, I made some threats, and I thought we moved on.

Then yesterday, I found what at first looked like a particularly swollen disposable diaper sitting on the bathroom floor.** Upon closer inspection, it was virgin toilet paper crumpled into a ball so dense that the sheer weight of it must have made D- struggle to wield it while on the toilet earlier that afternoon. Once it rolled boulder-like away from him, he was surely forced to make a second one***, possibly even a bigger one, cause that's just how men think.

After calling him in for another interrogation, we had a second talk, of course referencing the first, more threats, and what I felt to be a rational and productive Q&A comparing the relative size of his wee-wee and its microscopic leftover drop to the overstuffed bean bag chair that is his apparently typical wiping utensil. That hopefully has now done the trick.

Meanwhile, all three of us (soon to be a fourth, please God) have only just this afternoon finished going through Ball #1 from that single bathroom trip 24 hours earlier.


* How many other industries make a habit of encouraging waste and misuse of their products? What would people say to an Ikea ad showing a 5-year-old cutely taking a claw hammer to a bookcase while the mom shakes her head and smiles, and the announcer says, "Time to go back to Ikea!"^

** It's a testament to how plush this paper is that even in holding and staring at it up close, with that amount of it all balled up, I couldn't immediately be sure it wasn't a diaper, or possibly some kind of rag.

*** Just the thought of this sends a shiver up my spine, headed to wherever in my brain my compulsion to avoid waste in all its forms resides, so I need to find a way to repress these visions of disproportionate environmental damage.

^ That's not to imply I wouldn't like to watch someone else's 5-year-old take the hammer to that someone else's bookcase... maybe it'd be okay if it was already irreparably broken...