The Automatic Flushing Toilet is Evil

We started potty training Bunny during Bubs' staycation and it worked. She is basically 99.9% trained (crosses fingers, knocks wood, hops on one foot in a circle and spits). Accidents have been few and far between. She even made it through an entire week dry (overnights included). And yes I'm bragging just a little bit.

I'm glad we waited until she was ready. All in all its been awesome . . . that is until we encountered the automatic flushing toilet.

Now I know the automatic flushing toilet was invented as a convenience. It exists so that we don't have to touch the germy handles, too keep things cleaner. It just exists and I never gave it any thought. As far as I was concerned, it was a good thing. Until now.

We had a lovely day at the zoo on Saturday. It was 45 and sunny. We were enjoying it because we knew it wouldn't last, the snow was due to hit on Sunday. Trips to the zoo would stop for the year. We hit all of our favorites including the baby orangutang, Mahal, for mommy and the snakes, jellyfish and bats for Bunny.

But then we had to hit the bathroom and it was not so nice. The automatic flusher went off while Bunny was sitting on the potty and she freaked the heck out. She wouldn't go. We tried the potty at the giraffe house. No. The lion house. No! The visitor's center? No, no, no.

She took one look at the potty and made up her mind, if she didn't see a flush handle she wasn't going to go. I tried telling her that we could cover up the automatic flush so it wouldn't go off. Yeah that didn't work so well.

"No momma, I don't like these potties. No flush. I want to go home and use my potty."

You can't really argue with that logic. And I really didn't want to mess up all of her hard work becoming potty trained so we went home. She was a trooper. She made it home without an accident.

But of course you don't want to have to leave every place you are to use the potty at home. We may not be so close to home the next time. We have to solve this before it becomes a huge problem.

So I did a little research on the issue and you know whats supposed to work? Post-it notes. You just put one over the red eye on the potty and it won't flush until its removed. So simple, so easy. So now mommy is going to buy a huge stack of post-it notes and never leave home with out one.

Let's Spell It Out

S-p-e-l-l-i-n-g, the method of communication of all parents around the world whose children cannot spell. It enables us to talk about things that would get Bunny totally hyper, running for the door with shoes and coat in hand, screaming let's go now. So spelling is a good thing.

We spell out words like z-o-o, i-c-e c-r-e-a-m, p-a-r-k etc. That way we can decide if we want to do a certain activity or give Bunny something without her knowing. Saves a lot of tears if we do in fact decide we are not going to do it.

But lately Bubs and I have found ourselves spelling w-o-r-d-s t-h-a-t w-e d-o-n't n-e-e-d t-o s-p-e-l-l. And it can get quite annyoying as you can see. These words are either words that Bunny does not know, are not trigger words or are said when she is not even in the room. That last one is a killer, why are we spelling to eachother in a conversation that Bunny is not even a part of? I blame it on parental brain mush and lack of sleep.

There is another problem with spelling out words. I am not the world's greatest speller, I never was and the advent of spell check has made it worse. So when I spell a word I am not sure I am actually spelling it right, which is kind of embarassing. Also some when you spell some words out it doesn't sound like it should, which can add to the confusion.

But soon enough Bunny will be spelling like a champ (like sometime before she is 3) and we will no longer have this problem. In fact I can ask her if I am spelling something right.