I’m drying off from my weekly shower. The big boys are still quietly conquering Xbox Lego Batman in the TV room, and Sam has stayed put in the toy room, per my implicit instructions. I can hear him talking to himself, making vrooooming engine noises and psshhhhhhhhhhh crashing noises as he creates magnificent wrecks on the sunny carpet.

I pad into our bedroom, dress, sit at my vanity, and begin sectioning my hair to dry it. I hear the metal of the baby gate strain and click against its frame as Sam presses himself, belly first, into it.

“Muuuuuuuuum-Muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum!”

“Hey Sam!”

“I haf-ta poop!”

“Awesome! Let’s get to the potty!”

I jump up and prepare to give him a lights-n-sirens escort to the bathroom.

I thought Sam was going to be our gifted and talented student when it came to potty-training, but what began as a strong, promising stream of a start a year ago, has morphed into a big bait-n-switch joke. If Sam is wearing anything on his lower body, he treats it like a diaper. It makes no difference if that thing is absorbent or not…meant to hold human waste, or not. He is just as happy to make a poop sling out of his big-boy underpants as he is his Pull-Ups, as he is his diaper. I’ve gone so far as to run some baby PSYOPS, trying to make him empathize with Woody and Buzz, who have the unfortunate housing assignment on the back of Sam’s underpants. Oh, how SAD Woody and Buzz would be if you peed or pooped on them! Poor Woody and Buzz! Sam cares not a lick for the comfort or sanitary state of Woody and Buzz.

However, if we leave him pantsless, that seems to serve as an effective cue to use the potty when he has to go. It’s not very practical for anywhere but in the house and it’s a bit awkward if he runs to the door and gives the UPS dude the glass-pressed weenie treatment, but it’s the best we have right now.

When I reach Sam at the gate, there is no urgency about him. No pigeon-toed dancing around…no hand cupped behind his bum. And the devil is looking at me through his crystal blue eyes.

“I have a poop,” he repeats.

“You HAVE a poop or you HAVE TO poop?” I ask for clarification, because, big difference. Absent is the trademark Michelin-plant-ablaze smell that accompanies Sam’s offerings, so I’m not worried.

He holds out his hand to me and I can see a plastic, toy hamburger that came with a play food set that the boys got for Christmas one year peeking out from between his fingers. I play along.

“Oh! Is that your poop?” I hold out my hand. He grins, pleased that I’m playing with him, and dumps the hamburger into my palm. And the plastic hamburger is unnaturally warm. And sticky. And round instead of flat. And HOLY GOD!

I cannot convey in words how strong the human reflex is to get rid of a handful of warm feces. Somehow, I don’t scream or drop it or throw it or throw up. I grab Sam’s non-shitted-up hand with my non-shitted-up hand and drag him, lights-n-sirens, to the bathroom.

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!!! JESUS, SAM!!!”

We scrub our hands until they are shiny-pink and soft, me hunched over him from behind at the sink, controlling his hands like a puppeteer with OCD who just found her little marionette showering in a truck-stop urinal. Him, looking up at me, nodding solemnly as I describe the evils of playing with poo.

Then, I put a diaper on Sam and put him back in the toy room…and I take another shower.

One thing you should know about Liam is that he suffers from multiple personality disorder. Among the roughly 37 that we have documented, there are two overriding personalities under which all the others fall. There is Han Solo Liam and there is Dynamic Duo Liam. Solo Liam is way cool, laid back, chilled out, melllllloooow. He listens to Dark Side of the Moon and drives a VW Bus to preschool. Duo Liam is an angsty, whiny, control freak. He drinks way too much coffee and flosses with barbed wire. The difference between the two? The absence/presence of Liam’s perpetually airborne little brother, Nate. (The other little brother, the 20 lb. eating machine called Sam, does not have this effect on Liam. Yet.)

In addition to the assholish behavior mentioned above, Duo Liam also thrives on excluding Nate from things. Bill and I have been making it a point to take the boys out with us separately so that they can spread their turkey wings a little. They’re silly outings, errands really…Safeway, CVS, Wal-Mart. But even more than the adventure, Liam loves telling me about how Nate isn’t with us. ”Just Weem and Mum-Mum are going! Not Nate. Nate’s not going. Just Weem!” He’ll roll around in the idea and scrub the words all over himself again and again. He had a similar reaction last week when I tried explaining to the boys the importance of cooperation, especially during the day when the ratio of crazy parent to crazy kid is 1:3. “We need to help each other and work as a team. OK? Do you think you can do that for Mummy?” Nate beamed his sunny little face my way while Liam crossed his arms over his chest and said, “NO! No Nate is team! Just Weem is team!!” Um-hmm. There’s no L’i'am in ‘team,’ apparently.

So, when we took away Liam’s diapers cold turkey yesterday and began potty training, I used his love of excluding Nate to make the potty look like a delicious indulgence that NATE CAN’T HAVE! And, yes, I did consider the dozen or so ways this manipulation might come back to kick me in the junk in the future. But, having exhausted all logical arguments for not crapping your pants, I opted for the unconventional approach. ”The potty is just for Liam. Not Nate. Nate’s not potty trained like Liam will be.” And, it TOTALLY FREAKIN’ WORKED!

However, while my deception was well crafted and thorough, I failed to be specific enough in my instruction. What I said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty.” What I should have said was, “I have to put Nate down for his nap. I’ll be back in 10 minutes. If you need to poop while Mum-Mum is gone, please try to put your poop in the potty…and if you do? LEAVE! IT! THERE!” 

So subdued for one who just dipped his toys in a shit fondue pot.

…dipped his toys and his leg.

W! WTF!

I think this ‘Little People’ was supposed to be holding #2. 

It was almost worth the gagging to say, ”EAT SHIT, ELMO!!”

Because Liam is a path-of-greatest-resistance child, we’ve had to conquer most of his developmental milestones the hard way. Don’t misunderstand. We have always tried the “easy” way first. But, Liam laughed heartily at the normal, approved methods of sleep training, weaning from the breast, weaning from the bottle, and learning to walk, which he begrudgingly did at SEVENTEEN MONTHS of age. Finally, one day he just sighed and rolled his eyes at us, toddled across the floor, and then sat back down to finish the advanced trig problem he’d been working on before we had the nerve to bother him with the whole walking upright crap.

There is no middle ground for Liam. He is either angelic or rotten. Extremely advanced or extremely delayed. Poor kid got a double whammy of this genetic cocktail from both Bill and me. We inevitably fall on either the far left or far right of any given bell curve. Ability to spike a volleyball into an opponent’s face rendering them an unconscious heap on the floor? Jill, far right. Bill, far left. Ability to balance an entire check book in one’s head…in 12 seconds? Bill, far right. Jill, far left. I’m not sure who in his family Bill blames for passing this characteristic along to him, but I blame my Dad for mine. 100%. Mum, you’re totally off the hook for this one. Many times I’ve heard the quote my exasperated Papa Summerville uttered to my then teenage Dad; “Nothing in moderation! Not a GOD!-DAMN! thing in moderation!!” And so it goes two generations later…

For the last year, we have been trying to achieve the mother of all milestones with Liam. Potty training. Yes, I know it’s harder to train boys. Yes, I know they’ll go when they’re ready. Yes, I’ve been in enough chat rooms and on enough message boards to know that some parents who didn’t have a hard time potty training will use it as a platform to feel superior to those of us who are elbow deep in poopy SIZE 7 Pampers Cruisers. (41+ lbs., folks!! If not for those, he’d be sporting Depends.)

About a year ago, Liam gave us the smallest glimmer of hope that we would not have to travel the path lined with shattered beer bottles to get him potty trained. He put pee-pee in the potty for the first time! Bill and I did a wildly unattractive celebratory dance that culminated with me dumping the potty over Bill’s unsuspecting noggin like the head coach of the winning football team getting a Gatorade shower. Positive reinforcement and all that rot. Liam could not have been more horrified that we were happy and praising him. “NO MUM-MUM SAY, ‘GOOD JOB!’ AHHHHHHHHHHHHHARRRRRRRRAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! NO DAH-DAH SAY IT!!!”

From that moment on, he would have nothing to do with the potty. For a year we tried all of the normal potty training tactics and got nowhere. So, this morning, we went cold turkey. No more diapers, period. Liam will strut around naked from the waist down until he’s successfully using the potty and we’ll use pull-ups for naps and at night. I very calmly explained to Liam that we were saying ‘bye-bye’ to his diapers, that he was a big boy and it was time to start using the potty. He wasn’t on board with that idea and whimpered pitifully, trying desperately to convince me to let him keep his soggy, overnight diaper on. I gently told him ‘no’ and then pried off the last diaper that our eldest son will ever wear and put it in the diaper pail.

Thus begins Day 1 of Potty Training Boot Camp. Buckle-up, buttercup. This is going to be a horror show and I’m going to share it all with you.

“You know what the weirdest part about shitting in your own hand would be??”

*Blink*

“How heavy it would feel.”

“Uhhhno. I don’t think that would be the weirdest part about shitting in your own hand.”