TO POOP OR NOT TO POOP

I’m not gonna make a lot of friends with this post, but here goes…

I like to portray myself as someone who’s accepting of other people’s parenting methods, but the truth is I’m not. I have very strong feelings about how I do things versus how other people attack them. For example, I think there’s a very clear socially acceptable cutoff to breastfeeding and it’s well before the kid can “use their words” to ask for a little boob. And I think people who co-sleep with their kids are asking for a needy child. And don’t get me started on people who don’t trust their doctors when it comes to vaccines. However, I’ll be the first to admit that I only think I’m right. Deep down I know what works for one kid doesn’t always work for another and God knows what worked for my first child certainly isn’t doing the trick the second time around. But I still think I’m right. ☺ And yesterday I definitely felt I was right...

So I’m at one of my all time favorite playground alternatives yesterday, Barnes & Noble. I love taking the girls there because like a toy store the kids can go wild and play with all the stuffed animals and toys and I don’t have clean up after them because the unfortunate employee who’s been assigned to that section will do that for me. Plus, with all the books, it’s also like taking them to the library, except they can be loud. So there’s an “educational” component to the trip. There’s also a Starbucks in there, which is a major bonus for Daddy.

Anyway, Arden was hanging out in the Spongebob section with another little girl who was probably about three years old when suddenly the little girl turns to Arden and says, “I gotta poop” and then she ran off to her nanny who had been “busy” texting someone for the past half hour. I assumed Texty would take her to the bathroom because if a kid knows the shit is about to hit the fan, so speak, they’ve gotta be potty trained or at least in the process. But nope. Instead the world’s greatest nanny headfakes to a semi-private corner nearby and sends her over there to do her business in her pants while she continued her texting frenzy. Did I mention this girl had to be three and she had the wherewithal to ask to poop and to wait for the answer? Of course that corner was right next to me and like a bad car accident I couldn’t look away at the nightmare that was unfolding in front of me. I watched as the little girl bore down on a railing with her face turning bright red. She caught me staring and said the saddest five words I had ever heard, “I’m…going…to…the…potty.” It was then that I smashed the nanny’s cell phone on the ground. Or at least I wanted to.