I am a mother. And as a mother I find myself overloaded with questions all the time. Is he getting enough calcium? Now that it’s getting cold should he wear an undershirt? How old should he be to start preschool?

And the most important question of them all,

How much Dimetapp should I give him to go to sleep?

You know questions like that.

But as a newly potty training mother I find myself asking a new kind of question.

What do you with the poopy underwear?

You may recall that we’ve been potty training Phoenix since he was 18 months old. He was doing really well and then we moved and I got lazy. And we started traveling. We’ve gone off & on for the last few months. We’ll have really good weeks and then we’ll have really bad weeks. It just depends on his mood & mine.

When I am being a good & consistent & attentive mother and not playing on Twitter Phoenix will pee on the potty all day. But the one thing we just can’t seem to get is the poop.

My mom told me I need to pay attention to when he was pooping and I noticed it was around 1 & 2 in the afternoon. Some of those days he’s napping so the poops are usually just in his diaper. But some of these days he’s not napping & I forget what time it is and then Thomas the Train has a big poop turd on his face.

At this point I wonder. What do you with the poop underwear. It’s not always as simple as just slipping off the undies as carefully as possible and flushing his football player sized turd. Sometimes the poop is all squishy (Am I ruining lunch for you today?) and when you sit him on the toilet to help get the poop contained there’s poop all over the toilet set.

And of course as you pull down the poop underwear you’re only squashing it in more & really pissing Thomas the Train off because not only is he smelling it it’s now being thoroughly massaged into his train body.

By the time you get the underwear off you’ve got poop on the toilet seat, on the back of the kids leg and probably on your hands.

And if the poop is squishy & sticky (like a gross play-doh consistency) you can’t just dump it into the toilet. What do you do? Do you rinse it out in the sink? But if you do that you risk all the pieces not going down the drain. And you know what that means right? That means you need to use toilet paper to wipe it up. But the sink is wet. And wet poopy toilet paper is the epitome of disgusting.

So do you just toss these poopy underwear in the washer? What if you don’t have a laundry load to do? Do you be the complete opposite of green & wash just the Thomas the Train training pants? Or do you leave the pants in the dirty hamper until you’ve gathered enough dirty clothes so the eco-friendly police don’t come & arrest you?

There are many times I’m tempted to just toss those suckers in the trash like it’s a used Huggies disposable. And I may or may not have done this.

So what do you do with the poop?

However, I’m pleased to say yesterday we got our first poop on the pot. Some of it was in his pants but it was still a nice ball consistency and didn’t cause much mess or angst.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 1:53 am and is filed under About MotherHOOD, can you taste the sarcasm?, phoenix says, Toddlers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.