I’m a member of a group on Facebook. It’s a secret. I will only tell you it’s for mothers who have babies in litters and are also Mormon. You have to have eaten the excrement of a toddler and abstain from coffee to get in.

Sounds real fun, right?

It’s a very supportive and tolerant group whose members know the answer to every single question the universe ever asked. Especially if it relates to spawning, incubating and releasing humans into the wild. Also anything about large families.

We’re Mormon. We reproduce like there’s no tomorrow because…you don’t know – there might not be.

This group is the reason I have a Speed Queen washer and dryer, a Bosch dishwasher, crib kennels, long eyelashes, stretch pants covered in hotdogs and every other thing that creates sanity and balance in my life. These women know what works and where to get it cheap.

Enter tiny urinals.

Until now, I’ve only ever potty trained girls and honestly, I had very little to do with any of it. Really, the act of getting a child to drop off their DNA on a toilet is composed entirely of sessions of entertaining them while they sit on a toilet, until they decide of their own volition to adhere to societal norms and start dumping where everyone else does.

Potty training is way overrated.

You’re still going to be wiping their adorable little a$$es all day long with a wet wipe and changing them when they soil themselves at the most inconvenient times. You’ll just be changing something that has to be carried in a Target bag in your purse and washed instead of thrown away. It just adds an extra step, people.

You’ll only be magnifying the joy and work by playing “Find the Turd” in your mother’s house, “Chase the Dog Wolfing the Turd Down His Throat”, “Clean the Poop Off Every Square Inch of the Bathroom” and other non-feces related games such as “Toddler Garbage Sorting”, “Unravel the Expensive Toilet Paper” and “Clog the Sink with a Washcloth and Leave the Faucet Running”.

And because no one wants to make eye contact with a human trying to coax their untrained sphincter into releasing a doodoo, you’ll leave the bathroom to give him privacy and that’s when all these horrible things happen.

Once your kid is about 18 months, people inevitably start to ask you when you’ll start potty training. You’ll get excited and buy tiny underwear with puppies and unicorns on it and maybe a “baby potty” which is the human equivalent of a litter box sans tiny sand granules to help you filter out the feces and mask some of the stench.

You’re just setting yourself up for disappointment.

I want you to know that no place is sacred to a toddler wearing Paw Patrol panties. They will pee on your bible or your grave if it’s accessible. It’s like unprotected sex, ya’ll. It’s not gonna end well.

Today, I washed a whole, full log of poop because an older kid was assisting with toddler poopy time and deposited soiled underwear x 2 in the hamper and I didn’t know it. The sibling in question is old enough to know that it’s not nice to throw entire crap logs into a laundry hamper.

I almost shite my own log.

Wanna know the way I found the Baby Ruth in question? I’ll just say that the poop did not disintegrate as one might think it would and my left pinky finger might never smell the same.

As the mother of a lot offspring and a person who likes to research things until she finds an expert who preaches her particular brand of parenting laziness, I promise you that you don’t need to subject yourself to this diarrhea and nut covered torture.

Kids will just “go to the toilet”. No college kid ever went to school wearing a diaper. (That I’ve heard of anyway) Girls will do it pretty early on and boys take longer to figure it out, which is typical. How long did it take your husband to figure out you like him way better when he puts his undies in the hamper or closes the toilet lid or buys you a birthday day gift?

A pediatric urologist actually told me in English words from his mouth that boys’ urinary tracts take anywhere up to 4 years to mature fully. Like, their urethras don’t even work right for a long time. It’s like brushing your teeth whilst eating Oreos. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. They’re looking at their urine-spurting wieners and literally have no idea what’s happening or how to make it start or stop.

I had two kids (females) make the commitment around 18 months and two around 2.5 years old. I had a couple who still needed pull ups overnight for quite a while and two who were dry overnight right away.

One of my girls would calmly come into the kitchen, ask for a diaper to be placed upon her so she could poop. She would quietly go to the back porch, do her duty and return to be cleaned. It was always a long, straight poop and looked like she grew a tail inside her diaper. One of our favorite family sayings to this day is, “Doh! Somebody grew tail!” and then, “Someone needs to surgically remove the tail!”

My boys are three and still pissing and crapping on my grave, so you can imagine how that’s going.

Really, it’s like art. All you have to do and lay out the canvas and paintbrushes and kids will go buck when they’re ready. You don’t have to micromanage the process. You just support them and say, “…hey, there’s a toilet in there if you ever want to drop something off.”

They’ll look at you like you’re one nut short of a sundae, but one day you will walk into the bathroom, flip on the light and come face to face with a kid grunting one out. You’ll likely be shocked and won’t be sure what to do.

The kid will yell, “Don’t look at me,” between moans of birth giving. You won’t know whether to back away or help out. Either way, it won’t matter because there’s more than one way to skin a cat and I’m a firm believer that kids will skin their own if you let them.

So…I digress.

The tiny urinal.

My secretly amazing group of rocket scientist Mormon mothers were discussing these little urine receptacles that look like Asian woodland creatures with their mouths open, ready to accept gifts of pee pee. I thought, “Hey, they’re adorable. The boys might get a kick out of it. If nothing else, it will entertain the rest of the family.”

So I ordered two, because you know we can’t have one of anything without pandemonium and hair pulling. I figured any type of combat while we have our penises exposed is a bad idea, so two it was.

We hung them with suction cups to a glass door in the living room and guess what? Like kittens drawn to a shiny litter box, these two gravitated to it and deposit urine of their own accord about 10 times a day.

They also wave their hands in front of their own streams, scare me with frequent sharting and try to empty it by themselves, but hey, I gotta take progress where I can get it.

I have to tell you that two little boys chitchatting it up and tinkling into tiny urinals next to one another is the cutest thing you will likely ever see. They also pretend the lever handle on the door is a flusher. I could die.

I’ve heard moms say they didn’t like the itty bitty urinals. Yes, they’re small and yes, they’re made in China and yes, the tongue you’re supposed to flip with your urine stream in the frog’s mouth requires the force of spray from Poseidon’s weenie.

I think part of our success lies simply in the fact that two of anything amplifies interesting situations. Fun, exciting, potentially messy ideas spread like venereal disease amongst toddlers and they egg each other on so…frogs you pee into hits the mark with my twin tornadoes.

We still have dogs escaping with poop smashed into their teeth and tongues working like peanut butter and we have doody hunts multiple times a day, but I’m not sweatin’ it. They’ll eventually figure it out and we have a commercial washing machine and all hard floors in our house along with lots of little slaves…I mean kids, to clean it all up.

I’m just hoping the dynamic duo don’t try to get smart and poop into the little frog urinal’s mouth.

I still put diapers on them at nap and bedtime and when we leave the house because who wants to dismantle and wash a car seat or explain to the Target employee why there’s a nut log on the floor or carry poop-filled underpants in their purse?

No one. That’s who.

So, stay strong potty trainers. Keep laying out the goods for those toddlers and praying that they decide to submit to the status quo and start unloading in the porcelain throne sooner rather than later.

Want your very own Chinese Animal Urinal?

 

 

Got any corn and peanut covered wisdom for me?