As you may recall, we’ve had some setbacks trying to potty train our 3 year old Asher.  He got emotionally scarred by one of those automatic flushing toilets at the mall, which, I am pretty sure, he thought was going to suck him into the Chesapeake, tuckus first.

Since then he has been very reluctant to sit on any toilets anywhere except for his one “safe” toilet at home.  Unfortunately, he is very protective of this toilet as is evidenced by the fact that he was yelling at his sister yesterday to “get off my toilet.”

If only we had moved into a house where everyone could have their own potty.  What was I thinking?

Anyway, my wife made some progress with him this weekend.  On Sunday he came downstairs, inexplicably wearing underwear, proclaiming that he was now potty trained.

If only we could speak things into being.

“I have the body of Brad Pitt!”

……..hmm, sunken chest still present, arms still thin and birdlike, six pack abs still just a single 2 liter, nope, doesn’t work.

We had bought Asher some underwear about a year ago when things were looking more promising, but since then, the undies have lain dormant in the top drawer of his dresser.  Well, recently he has taken to getting up during his naps and exploring his room.  He clearly found the underoos and decided that he was done with the diaper.

Super!

So Sarah had a nice long talk with him about going pee pee on the potty etc. etc. and decided to give it a try.  At first he went potty very well, but then about an hour later when we asked him to try again, he refused and there ensued a short battle of wills to get him up on a toilet again.  Eventually he gave in and successfully made another liquid deposit.

But half an hour after that, he peed in his pants.   We picked up on this as he was walking bow legged through the living room with a giant stain down his leg.

A couple of hours later it happened again.  Some would say this was a mixed success, I would say that we probably just got lucky once.

Anyway, we put him to bed in his diaper, more or less assuming that the day had been a bust. I figured that the next morning I would just put him in a diaper again and we would wait to try again.  Well, to my surprise he came downstairs the next morning in underwear, all ready to try again. 

Ok.

I thought this was a really good sign, but then I got suspicious.    Very suspicious.

I went up to his room and my suspicions were proven to be, unfortunately, accurate.  Apparently, after Sarah had put him to bed the night before he got up, took his diaper off, put some underwear on, got back into bed, peed all over himself, his pillow, his mattress and his blanket and then got up, and put on a pair of fresh clean underwear in the morning, (they’ll never know) throwing his soiled skivvies willy nilly around his carpeted room.

Oh, joy.

At this point, I said screw it, and put him in a diaper.  Later that day he was still refusing to even sit on any foreign “unsafe” toilets while we were out shopping and I was wondering if there would ever come a time when my little boy would not need to strap a pack of gel beads to his bottom to soak up his urine.  Perhaps in his teens.

I’m not even sure if this next part is related at all to what I’ve been talking about, but somehow in my head, it all makes sense.

Later in the day, I was cleaning my room and the kids were all up there rolling around on the carpet being silly.  I asked Asher if he needed to go potty, he said yes, so I sent him off.  He comes back a few minutes later buck naked from the waist down.  “Go get a diaper,” I tell him, but he just runs off to the other side of the room and begins to roll around in his nakedness.

I wish I could tell you that this was unusual.

I basically just took a deep breath and decided to deal with his little nudey booty after I got the laundry picked up.

“Daddy!”  Audra yells, while ensconced in giggles, “Asher’s playing with his penis!”

I look over and, sure enough, Asher is jumping up and down, singing and giving himself a series of good yanks.

“Asher, stop it,”  I said, although clearly with not enough severity in my voice, because instead of becoming chastened, he seemed to sense an opportunity to entertain.

That’s the problem with this kid.  He’s the child that makes you laugh while you’re trying to discipline him.  I’m usually pretty good about that kind of thing, but every once in a while he gets this goofy gleam in his eye and it becomes really difficult to keep a straight face.

So, Asher does not, in fact, decide to “stop,” as directed.  Instead, he takes both hands and begins bouncing up and down and essentially, well, um…. juggling himself, all the while singing “bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bouncy.”

I want you to know, for the record,  that I tried very, very hard to be stern, but somewhere in the midst of saying:  “Asher you need to stop grabbing….”  I lost it.  Just flat out lost it.  I burst into laughter that just seemed to escalate.   I literally couldn’t regain control. 

All the while Asher starts singing louder “BOUNCY BOUNCY BOUNCY!” and gleefully juggling himself harder and harder till I started to worry about my future grandchildren.

It is here that my daughter, who had been laughing along with me at this wildly inappropriate situation, decided that her brother was getting a little too much attention and that she too wanted to get some of these laughs for herself.

Yep, you guessed it.

So, she proceeds to pull her pants down, jump around, singing “bouncy bouncy” all the while tugging on imaginary testicles.

“That’s it!”  I was finally able to shout.  I can be overcome by the crazy sometimes, but I also know when that line has been crossed.  And boy oh boy had it been crossed.

I regained control of everyone in my bedroom, except for my one-year-old Micah who had his head planted on the ground and was crawling in circles around it, and within minutes, all of my children were dressed, privates covered, hands out in the open. 

I really don’t know what lessons to draw from all of this, except that.

1.  Little boys are weird.

2.  Little girls are not as weird, but sometimes wish they were.

3.  If you don’t immediately put a diaper on your kid, peeing on the carpet is not the worst thing that could happen.  A future career as an inappropriate clown in some tacky Vegas show is.

PS.  The coda to this story is that while I was writing this, Audra marched into inform me that “Asher was upstairs, naked, holding a diaper in his hand.  I reluctantly climbed the stairs only to discover that Asher had, again, exchanged his diaper in the middle of the night and peed all over creation.  The Midnight Commando had struck again.