Here we go again...

Can you guess what this is? Let me give you a hint, I have an almost-three-year-old wearing no pants running around my house in an attempt to potty train. So, yes, this is yet another picture of crap and, yet again, my life is revolving around waste products. The only difference is the poo is surrounded by train tracks, instead of Polly Pockets, when it winds up on the floor.

Some of you might recall the trials and tribulations of potty training #2, starting when she was three and finally, finally, reaching successful completion at the ripe old age of four and a half. After eighteen months of hell, including becoming way too familiarwith laxatives, I learned my lesson and am taking a very relaxed and light-hearted approach to teaching Little Man to use the facilities and letting him decide when, and obviously where, he is ready to go. And while some of the lessons I learned with the girls are coming in handy, potty training a boy is an entirely new and, I have to say, a more challenging experience.

First of all, the sheer physics of male urination provide a set of obstacles I did not foresee. When I bought our potty years back, I blithely chucked the little plastic guard thing that came with it, sure I would have no use for it. Yeah, because I had girls. That little guard thing is to make up for the fact that a three year-old's equipment is small and generally points straight up when he sits in the potty, creating a fire hose situation. Who would have thought, seeing a man pee easily in the woods on the side of the road without soakng himself, that this is how it all begins? Even with the guard, I have had to teach Little Man to use a finger to point his business in the right direction, which then lead to a startling discovery when touching his junk that made me extremely uncomfortable. "Look, I make it big Mommy!" Oh God. H mocks me for being embarrassed at this, but when asked how he would deal with it if the girls had such a physical reaction and he just left the room stammering.

Potty training is, by nature, a multi-step process - first teaching them to pee, to poop, how to pull underwear up and down - but I am realizing with boys, as with men, everything is more complicated. With my girls, the pants-free, beginning stages of training were modestly handled by wearing dresses. Little Man is wearing a variety of his larger T-shirts, but his junk is still flapping all over the place and is distracting him in his efforts to go (see above). You just teach girls to sit and let the waste products fall out of them into a vessel - done and done. With Little Man, after I complete that step, I will then have to teach him to pee standing up without soaking himself and the bathroom. Then I have to teach him to wrangle his business out of that little flap in the front of the underwear, since after the age of four, being spotted bare-assed in front of the urinal sets you up for a tortuous elementary school identity as Droopy Drawers. And how to maneuver his johnson through a jeans zipper without inflicting a serious flesh wound is a lesson, I think, best taught by Daddy.

So wish me luck, dear readers. I am praying I do not have a long road a ahead of me. But even if I do, I can see the light at the end of the Pee and Shit Tunnel. My days of spending ridiculous amounts of money on diapers are almost behind me. Soon I can spend those funds freeely on purses and shoes. Which will be a comfort when I am wiping the piss from two men with no aim off the toilet bowl each day.