Potty-training blues: A page from Eli's Plog

Potty Training Blues

So, we’re potty training Eli. If you think it odd to start this process while Justin is frantically writing final papers—instead of waiting two weeks until he is completely idle—rest assured that at least one member of the editorial board shares your view. But minority views notwithstanding, here we are, and here is Eli, no longer in diapers. The going so far—today was Day 4—has been neither a smashing success nor a crashing failure. Eli’s performance has been mixed; her Potty Log (“Plog”) presents a staggered array of ebullient smiley faces and doleful X’s. On occasion, two successes in a row have won for Eli and Julia a peppermint candy cane from our newly-furnished Christmas tree.

Tonight, however, presented a notable failure. It all began a few minutes after bedtime, with Lia gone with Katharine to a primary presidency meeting. Julia, the reader might as well know, has the maddening habit of holding off on her own bathroom needs until immediately after going down for a nap (she doesn’t really take them, but she has to lie down for thirty minutes while Eli falls asleep) or bedtime, at which point needing to go to the bathroom provides an easy means of escape from her bedroom with impunity. She pulled the dastardly trick again tonight, impudently ignored Justin’s remonstrations about how insolent and annoying this practice is. Eli interpreted Julia’s escape as a sign of her own liberation. Eli too emerged from the bedroom, beaming like a clown. Justin asked if she needed to go potty. She said no. Justin said that in that case she had better return her diminutive person to her diminutive mattress post-haste or face the consequences. Eli, surprisingly enough, turned on her heel and went giggling back to bed.

But she went back to the wrong bed, climbing into Julia’s bed with an impish smile, enamored of her own cleverness. Thus perched in her big sister’s vacant bed, the usurper marked the newfound territory as her own. “I need to go potty!” Eli called, a sextasyllabic utterance which Lia interprets as a sign of dawning awareness of urinary needs but which Justin construes, with rather greater accuracy, as a declaration that (protecting the guilty with a passive construction) an accident has just been had. In this case, the accident proved a wide ranging shower that took in its wake Julia’s quilt and mattress cover, as well as Eli’s panties, pajama pants, socks, and Tyred. Not even the hardwood floor was spared.

Eli seemed quite pleased with all of this. Justin set her on her potty chair, in accordance with the idle possibility that any fluid might remain after so generous a deluge. Eli giggled and talked cheerfully to herself. This will never do, thought Justin, and he peremptorily put a stop to such merriment in terms that replaced her laughter with tears. Then, in one of those cruel ironies of parenthood, Justin found it took far longer to replace those tears again with laughter. But in time he got Eli back into bed, tossed the wetted linens ‘n things into the tub (to be dealt with later), remade Julia’s bed, cajoled Julia back into it, and tucked the girls in again an hour or so after doing so the first time. This, too, will be recalled in his favor in the Valley of Jehoshaphat.

As Lia puts it, “Even bad parents deserve a reward for putting up with potty-training.” Or, as Justin's high school physiology teacher put it, "There is no rest for the wicked, and the righteous don't need it." Or, as Lia's dad puts it, least relevantly of all, "You can't lead a horse to water, but you can salt his oats."