I’ve finally come to understand the basic connection
between grandparents and tiny grandchildren: diapers. They really want to get out of them,
and we don't want to get into them.
Nothing made this clearer than a recent weekend when
two of our grandtots were in residence. It would be accurate to say that much
of the conversation revolved around the words “pee pee” and “poo poo” and who might
be doing which of them when. Olof and I did not escape scrutiny.
The tots’ parents made sure the household’s
bathrooms were well stocked with mini-jelly beans as rewards for successful
performance. This concerned me as Olof is inordinately fond of jelly beans and
I wasn’t sure I could trust him not to filch a few whether he’d gone pee pee in
the potty or not.
“Olof,” I said, “you had better not even THINK of
touching those jelly beans.”
He retorted, “I think there’s a good reason they’re
not using chocolate, Inga.”
The grandkids, ironically, were definitely on the
honor system. It was just the grandparents who couldn’t be trusted.
The older of the two grandchildren is now fully
potty trained, even at night. “So,” I said to her parents when we babysat one
night, “do we need to take her to the bathroom before we go to bed?”
“Nope,” they said. “She’s good until morning.”
“But that’s eleven
hours,” we said with more than a little incredulity. Olof and I looked at
each other wistfully. Those days are so
over for us. Neither of us ever expected to suffer from Pre-school Bladder Envy.
Since she is a now a pro in the potty department,
the four-year-old is actively helping her 2-year-old brother master the
mysteries of planned performance. She is an eager dispenser of jelly beans, an
accomplished clapper, and an expert demonstrator of toilet flush technique. (It’s
all in the wrist.) Post-execution hand
washing and foot stool sink placement are also in her vast repertoire. She
awards herself a mini-jelly bean as an administrative fee when output goals are
met.
Unlike grandma, she even knows which is the front on
the pull-ups. While we’re on the subject of pull-ups, these are the best
invention ever. They didn’t have them when my kids were toddlers. We either had
either diapers or cotton training pants theoretically reinforced in key areas
in an illusion of protection which didn’t prevent “accidents” from turning the
child’s entire outfit noxiously soggy. While online research indicates that
there are better options in the training pant world now, somewhere along the
way, some brilliant parent, tired of re-attiring a squirmy two-year-old after a
training pant failure, said, “there really needs to be an intermediate step
here.” And voilà, pull-ups, a stretchy disposable
diaper material underpant that the kid can pull on and off himself.
Now, as with anything kid-related, there is
controversy. It’s no secret that there is no more competitive world than
parenthood. Among the factions in this case are the anti-pull-up contingent who
say that the feel of the disposable diaper material only confuses the child and
delays potty training. If you want your kid to be pooping on his shoes until
he’s ten, go for the pull-ups. They maintain that one should go straight from
diapers to the training pants, or in the case of uber-competitive parents
hell-bent on giving the kid an early mindset for Harvard, right from diapers to
actual superhero underpants. (One mom scarily blogged, “I used big kid underwear right from the
start and told him if they peed or pooped in them the characters would be
mad.”)
Personally, I think the person who invented pull-ups
should get the Nobel Prize for Laundry. With the pull-ups, if things don’t go
exactly as planned, the kid's clothes aren’t wet too. And the kid can theoretically
take off the pull-up himself and even pull up a dry one. This, in my view, is
the sort of ingenuity that made America great.
Anyway, the grandtots were very generous about
rewarding us with mini-jelly beans if we’d performed. We weren’t all that
interested in an audience so they had to take our word for it. They did. They were
even happy to clap for us in absentia.
Even though they’ve gone home, we’re finding the
subject of potty performance has somehow lingered. It’s kind of like a song you
can’t get out of your head. Is it because the adult version of pull-ups could
be in our future?
Then again, we could just be missing the jelly beans.
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