Kitty's Potty Adventure

You know how when you have children under the age of accountability they like to ruin things for you?  And, since they are not accountable, it's your fault? 

Church is one of the things that our children--as wonderful as they are--try to ruin on a regular basis. Church has become a weekly epic battle of shhing and under-the-breath threats met with screaming and the willful breaking of crayons.  These battles usually start in the pews and move out to the hallways, classrooms, cars, and--on the rare occasion--through the streets of the adjacent neighborhoods.

They are similar to the old Warner Brothers cartoons where the sheep and the coyote walk to work as friends in the morning, clock in, fight all day, and then clock out and walk home as friends.  When church is over we all pile into the van and drive home, and it's like everyone was "just doing [our] job[s]."

So, anyway, I was at church yesterday, enduring the battle.  When Kitty (names have been changed), our three-year-old, declared her need to go potty.  Lady Buffington (titles have been invented), my wife, was attending another congregation with our other daughter, so I was wrangling the other three on my own.  The pee-pee-dance-like movement of her body indicated to the trained eye that she was serious about needing to "go."  Also, Cubby (the baby), was becoming distracting to the families around us.  So, Cubby, Kitty, and I excused ourselves and headed for the restrooms (Ike, almost 8, was reading an issue of The Friend magazine and didn't follow us).

When we got to the restrooms, Kitty insisted on going into the ladies' room, a place I cannot go, at least according to the cease and desist letters I keep getting (okay, that was a bad joke, forget I wrote it).  Of course, she's old enough to "go" by herself, she does it all the time at home.  So, I consented.  Besides, no one chooses to go into a men's room, but in the most dire of circumstances.

I stood near the door and waited.  A vent, located on the wall above the ladies' room entrance, allows waiting parties to hear louder-than-usual conversations that take place in the ladies' room.  Through that vent I could hear Kitty singing in recitative (recitative, for those of you not familiar with opera or oratorio, is a style of singing that is close to the rhythm of natural speech, used in opera for dialogue and narration),  "I'm in the bathroom, by myself.  My daddy can't come in.  He is outside the door, while I go potty, all by myself" and so on.  That was the recitative, the aria followed.

The aria was the opening line, slightly modified, of the opening song of the first Shrek movie.

"SomeBODy once told me the WORLD was macaroni!" repeated over and over and over again.  She sang it loudly, flooding the song out into the hallway.  She sang it as other women came and went from the restroom.  She sang it as if she were proud to sing such a fine song in the restroom of a church.

As she came out, her hands still dripping from the post-potty scrubbing, I found myself just a little more in love with her than I was before she went in.  We didn't venture back to the chapel.  I spent the rest of the meeting in the halls watching and playing with my little ones.  Ike eventually joined us.

Kitty had won the battle.  I (with the help of Lady Buffington) will have to regroup and try it again next week.