This? Is how the Little Miss & I greet each other….

In her defense, she’s only 8mo old.

In mine… Well, she started it!

There was a brief period, back in the day, when I had only one child. An only child who couldn’t reach the top of the entertainment cabinet, let alone the kitchen counters. An only child who didn’t know what candy, tv, or the word “no” was. An only child who took 2 full naps each and every blessed day.

Two. Full. Naps.

My gawd, if only I had known what a luxury that was. I’d have spent less of those nap times with P90X and the dishes, and a bit more with my shower and television. But I thought all children napped like that. At least until they left for college. I know. Foolish, foolish me. 

But, alas, I soon learned my lesson. And along with the naps, we also lost our cable tv.

I mean, really, if I can’t watch at least 6hours of it a day, what’s the point in even Having it?

Needless to say, that? Was a mistake.

Not because I’m in desperate need of my weekly Glee Modern Family fix. Or because, should Armageddon befall us, I won’t actually realize it until I show up at playgroup to find the four horsemen of the apocalypse have joined the teaparty. The last time I got late-breaking news interrupting my day was when the neighbor knocked on my door to let me know my car was about to get towed.

No. Sadly, it is not I who shall suffer the severing of our HD connection to the world. I do have the password to the internet, after all. No. Sadly, it is the children who suffer most.

Specifically, our daughter.

Because one day, twenty years from now, Stacey and Clinton will hobble up to her with their co-ordinated madras walkers and a camera crew, hand her a $5000 Visa gift card….and she won’t know what to do.

And it will be all my fault. Partly because it will probably be her one foray out of the convent to buy supplies for the homeless. But mostly because I? Haven’t a clue as to how to dress her.

Not. One. Freakin’. Clue.

And she’s only 8months old.

Granted, in my defense, she is wearing 24month clothing. So there’s the whole issue of how to dress her in age-appropriate clothing when she doesn’t wear an age-appropriate size. Right?

Right.

AND…

There’s there part where, somewhere in the last decade, I seem to have lost my femininity.

Granted, I’ve never been a girly girl. At least not since my mother gave up trying to dress me and left me to my own devices in the middle of the junior’s department at Kohl’s. But even in high school I regularly paired a darling cropped sweater with a mini skirt and 3inch platform heels. Truly a look that, while it might scream prostitute, cannot help but be feminine.

And I was, at one time, a debutante. AND a sorority girl.

So, in all honestly, my femininity should be as inherent a part of me as that tattoo on you upper right shoulder blade.

And yet here we are. Dressed to impress in skinny jeans, and a flannel shirt. Which doesn’t sound that bad until you realize I’ve paired them with a pair of cowboy boots. Actual cowboy boots. Not the look-so-hott-on-the-runway-but-if-you-show-up-at-the-dude-ranch-in-them-prepare-to-be-laughed-back-to-the-city boots. I suppose we could just call them Urban cowboy boots for short.

Which takes the punky feminine edge right off that outfit.

And my daughter?

Well….

We’ll go ahead and schedule her intervention for 2032, shall we?

Once upon a time, in a land south of the Mason Dixon Line, there lived a girl and her prince. She was a doe-eyed freshman, locked away in a single-sex dorm in the heart of a cavalier campus; he was an experienced senior. But both were swept up in a thing called love.

Luckily for them, there was a day created especially to celebrate their love. A day called Valentine’s Day.  And on this day, he picked her up in his light blue ’67 Chevy Pickup, his cowboy hat and combat boots gleaming, and a bouquet of freshly-picked daffodils from the flower beds outside of the cafeteria in his hands. She wore her roommate’s prettiest dress and ordered the salad instead of the steak. Afterwards, they cuddled on the couch as he introduced her to his favorite movie, Gladiator.

Truly, it was a magical time.

Unfortunately for our story, 6 years later the girl and her prince were married.

And as the wedding bells tolled, so did they toll for the death of her Valentine’s Day.

To be fair, though, she should have seen it coming…

Our second Valentine’s Day? He still picked me up in his ’67 Chevy. The hat and boots might not have been gleaming, but I still had enough stars in my eyes to make them shine. He gave me my pick of restaurants for the evening’s meal. I chose a charming little italian place down town. As did every other red-blooded woman in that city. So we ended up at McDonalds.

By our third Valentine’s Day, we had down graded to a simple exchange of gifts. He was a waiter at the time, and his evening was spent flirting with tipsy sorority girls and blue-haired octogenarians, while mine was spent slinging pizzas and turning down repeated offers to check my breasts for implants from the grill boy at the on-campus dive. We met up after shift and hurriedly exchanged our gifts. A box of BBQ Sauce for him, a case of Diet Coke for me. And then we went to bed. Separately. Without showering.

The next year? I got a giant stuffed gorilla. Specifically, the one I had pointed out to him in Walgreens as possibly the most hideous thing I had ever seen. He? May have gotten a card. I think.

By our fifth Valentine’s Day, the Big Man had moved on to medical school. Pleading poverty and a looming deadline, he actually skipped the entire holiday. And I let him. Probably because it saved me from having to think of yet another gift to give him.

I’m sorry, but when Christmas is in December and your loved one’s birthday is a mere 3 months later? Stuffing yet another gift in between them is like asking for a third slice of cheese on your bologna sandwich. It’s not going to make much of a difference.

Somehow, he managed to sell me on the idea of skipping Valentine’s Day altogether the next year. We celebrated President’s Day instead. Partly to avoid the crowds. But mostly because he had a coupon.

And so it went.

Until this weekend, ten years after that first Valentine’s Day, when, by golly, there will be romance. There will be soft music. And candles. And chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne, and roses.

Because I bought them for myself.

Happy President’s Day, Ya’ll!

So. We’re in our fourth week of potty training here at the Domesticated house. That’s right. FOURTH. WEEK. Which means I have spent an entire month crammed in a bathroom only slightly bigger than those featured in the economy section of a Delta commuter flight with a bored infant, a toddler who thinks it is Absolutely Hilarious to pee THROUGH the crack in the toilet seats, and enough potties, toys, m&m’s, and clorox wipes to make it through Armageddon.

It’s like life is giving me a giant swirlie.

And while I’d like to declare victory at this point, two years of parenthood has taught me nothing if not that the minute I do so? I’ll be dragging out the ShamWows and Swiffer Mops.

Ask me again in 18 years.

At which point the answer will still be “Almost.”

But I miss ya’ll. Which is why I snatched these few precious moments, as the Little Man reloads chugs 1/2 a gallon of milk, to wipe the pee off my keyboard** and pass along a few words of wisdom. Otherwise known as the “Potty Training Survival Kit:”

**Oh, how I wish I was joking…

No. I haven’t given up hope for the Little Man yet. Although it is tempting. It’s only been 5 days. Not of actual potty training, mind you, just of practicing for potty training. Otherwise known as Potty De-Sensitization, wherein I attempt to cure the Little Man of his fear of the toilet by inducing him to bring his little bare behind into contact with it on a regular basis.

Wow. That actually sounded like a solid theory.

But between spending 20minutes every 3hours holding the Little Man’s pants hostage to get him to sit for 30 seconds of potty time, and the Little Miss’s decision to become a raver and thus start the party at 2am every night, I’m reminded more and more of my sophomore year of college….

The Year: 2002

The Location: An upperclass dorm on the outskirts of campus.

There were four of us living together in a small, two-bedroom apartment built entirely out of cinder blocks and paint the color of fresh bird shit. We had a living room, one and a half bath, and a kitchen just big enough to sit a state-of-the-art George Foreman grill on the most rickety of our kitchen chairs in the corner next to the table. Nothing fancy, and certainly not worth the rent the University was charging us for it. But the rent wasn’t due until the end of each semester, and with the glow of MTV bathing the walls 24/7 it gave off a cozy glow and just the barest hint of mildew in the Spring.

When we weren’t napping pulling all-nighters in the library or spending the night over at our boyfriend’s places, S & I shared one of the two rooms. Or, rather, I slept in there and she slept out in the living room, listening to her fiance’s slow & steady breathing over the telephone throughout the night. E & N shared the other room. They’d met at a transfers’ welcome shindig and had spent the rest of the semester bonding over make-up tips, hang-over cures, and cheerleading try-outs.

One memorable night, there was a bit of a commotion out in the common area. It seemed to quiet down after a few minutes, so I deemed it safe to go on out and make sure the TV had survived. As I wandered out of my room, S came barreling towards me. It was late, and the later it got the thicker her French accent became. But I was fairly certain she was trying to convince me not to take one more bare-footed step further.

“NO! NO! Don’t go out there!”

um. ok?

“The floor…there is PEE EVERYWHERE”

HUH?

Apparently, E & N had come back about an hour before from their latest mixer/barhop/moonshine and tucked themselves into bed at the surprisingly early hour of 2am. Except then E decided she needed to pee. Which, being a big girl, she got herself out of bed to do all on her own.

Except she kind of missed the bathroom.

And by kind of, I mean she strolled right past both bathrooms and their accompanying toilets, through the living room, and into the kitchen. Where she proceeded to go over to the George Foreman Grill, lift up the cover, pull down her pants, and relieve herself.

In case you aren’t familiar with this staple of dorm life, the G.F. Grill is an ingenious little device for grilling anything your heart can handle. And to facilitate this, it boasts a slanted surface designed to drain the grease from your food down into a convenient, albeit low-capacity, trough.

E filled the trough.

And then some.

Now, S may not have been in the country long but she was fairly certain, having seen none of us do this before, and having seen us use this device for cooking on numerous occasions, that this? Was not normal. Despite her best efforts, however, she could not induce the sleep-walking E to hold it long enough to get her to the loo. She did, however, manage to shove her pants back up her butt and propel her back into her room for the night once it was all over.

So, after we’d emptied the entirety of our collection of cleaning solutions onto the kitchen floor, S & I went to bed and tried to decide how, exactly, to break the news to E.

We shouldn’t have worried.

Turns out, she’s quite comfortable with her propensity for mistaking cooking implements and, apparently, $300 leather shoes for toilets. So much so that, after she finished thanking us for cleaning up, she plugged in the George Foreman and proceeded to make breakfast.

S&I, however? Had cereal.

There are a lot of things I didn’t think through before embarking on this whole “having children” thing. Like how much I hate coming into contact with other people’s bodily fluids. (Hint: Almost as much as I hate coming into contact with my own...) Or that I lack, among other things, a degree in early child development. Or that its been quite a while since I had to figure out things like, oh, I don’t know, how to hold one’s pee until one has reached the appropriate receptacle for it. It’s been at least 9 years since I had to explain That one.

Sadly, I am not joking.

Had I thought that last one through? I’d probably be vacationing on a beach somewhere, content in the knowledge that should I choose to sunbathe topless, a roving photographer for National Geographic would not be mistaking me for their next native cover model.

And yet, here we are. Dead of winter. In Maine. Potty Training.

I should send that last line to Steven King. You know, in case he’s hit writer’s block for his next scare-your-pants-off novel.

Well. Almost.

We’re inching our way To potty training. Which, to be fair, we have been for the past…7 months. But the first time the Little Man showed any interest in not sitting in a dirty, dirty diaper was right about the time we brought the Little Miss home from the hospital. And moved half way across the country.

And as much as I admired his inclinations towards sanitation, then? Was just NOT a good time.

But I was afraid of missing THE WINDOW. You know the one – if you miss it, you will be changing your child’s dirty diapers until the army finally resumes the draft and takes over. Or at least that’s what the Internet said.

So as soon as we had unpacked enough boxes to make room for more, I called up Amazon and went to work. We got potty chairS. And new potty toilet coverS. And potty bookS for him. And potty bookS for me. And a portable potty seat thingy. And a training pant. But just one. I don’t remember why, but it must have made sense at the time.

And just about the time I was ready to wade in to potty training, the Little Man? Decided perhaps he had a good thing going with the whole make-Mommy-wipe-my-butt-for-me thing.

And so we waited.

And waited.

And then! He showed interest again! For like a week. Specifically, the week before we embarked on our 3-week tour of the upper East Coast. And since it was not on My itinerary to hit more than one toilet per state? We waited.

Until this week. When I finally finished reading at least one of the potty books. And decided it was time. I laid out our approach with the Big Man, and went to bed dreaming of 30less diapers to wash. The next morning, I gleefully announced to the Little Man that it was POTTY TIME! YAY!!

At which point, he totally and completely Freaked.

And not in the YAY!! IT’S POTTY TIME! way. More in the OMG – DON’T PUT ME ON THE SUCKING POT OF DEATH, DON’T YOU LOVE ME AT ALL, WOMAN??? way.

YAY!???!