I’m not sure how it is with girls, but as a parent with young boys, you must quickly acclimate to the “gross factor.” You’ll begin having incidents with boogers and poop very early on. Then, the older the boys get, the funnier they will think these incidents are! My boys think the word “poop” is the funniest word in the world…followed by “Toot” in a very close 2nd. I remember the two of my boys having a conversation that lasted 10 minutes while we were in Tombstone, Arizona that pretty much just consisted of those 2 words. Instead of taking in the scenery, the Old West, the cowboy stuff, they just sat there volleying the words “poop” and “toot” back and forth to each other. It was very silly, but to them it was as funny as Jerry Lewis, Richard Pryor, and Will Ferrell all combined!
Once, when my twin sons were in the early stages of being potty trained, we had what I can only describe as an incident. I want to say the boys were around 2 years old. My wife and I were both in our morning routine, getting ready for work. I was in the shower, she was at her sink. The shower curtain shakes. I look out to find one of my boys looking up at me, babbling incoherently with an alarmed look on his face. The meaning of this had me puzzled, and just as quickly as he came in, he turns and exits the room. That's when I spot brown on the bottom of his sock! I yelled to my wife, “Did you see what was on his foot?” I threw a towel on quickly and began the pursuit. He had crossed through our bedroom. Brown tracks across the carpet confirmed this. In the next room, I see my other twin sitting in the floor directly beside the changing table, naked on the floor. Beside him was his diaper. Beside that was a large poop (minus the foot mark)! The foot prints of the other twin went through the poop, circled round and round a few times, went into the other room and back…as if he’d been unsure what to do once he’d literally stepped in it.
And, then there’s just a kid’s complete and utter disregard for all things germy! One such occasion that absolutely screamed for anti-bacterial wipes happened to us when I took my boys to their first basketball game. We were at a Charlotte Hornets game at Spectrum Arena in Charlotte, NC, and I had to take the boys to the bathroom. One goes in a stall. I go to the urinal. My second boy didn’t need to use the bathroom, but came to the bathroom with us anyway. While everyone else was doing their business, he became bored. He talks non-stop, so it doesn’t take him long to get bored. He decided to strike up a conversation with me about things he was finding interesting about the game. Then, all casual like, he walks up to the vacant urinal beside me, puts one hand on the side of his head to look contemplative, and leans with his other arm into the adjacent urinal, propping on its outer rim as if he was leaning up against a wall! That, of course, startled me. While I am not normally a germiphobe myself, this crossed a line. I screamed, finished off my bathroom action very quickly, likely no longer aiming…and said, “don’t lean on the urinal, it’s covered in pee!” This boy, who IS a germiphobe, panics. He leaps away from the urinal and begins a sort of side-to-side dance, not knowing what to do. Coincidentally, he is also the one that stepped in his brother’s poop, so at least he has a reason to be a germiphobe. And, he stayed true to himself, doing that same “I don’t know what to do now” dance each time. I snag him and rush him to the sink to scrub him.
As I said, the older they get, the worse it gets…at least in how it is involved with their sense of humor. The mishaps themselves, I HOPE are over. A baby pooping in the floor…that’s a funny story. An eight year old doing it? Not so funny. So, here’s hoping. The humor though shows no end in sight. I’m constantly attacked by gas…no matter what the Geneva Convention says. Sitting on the couch, watching tv, I often turn to see a small child in downward dog yoga position…aiming his butt at me. It’s a weapon. He attacks, I gag from the smell. It’s all just SO hilarious to them. At a camping trip last year, the cub master explained the use of dutch ovens when cooking for camping events. Everyone else listened intently. My boys though? They giggled at each mention of “dutch oven”. Each and every single time.”