The Insane Are Running Bedlam

What possesses a child to take a simple operation such as cleaning his heinie after sitting on the throne and turn it into a target skills practice session that blends Pin the Tail on the Donkey and the venerable Bean Bag Toss? My children are insane. Certifiable. And they are taking their father down with them!

I was sitting at the computer last night, minding my own business, when I caught that light, fragrant whiff of excrement. There were three dogs asleep at my feet. The Boss was on the couch behind me, listening to Major Havoc read out loud from a Pee Wee Scout book. Yes, the boy is reading chapters books. The Captain was in bed and the General was nowhere to be found. While briefly considering which dog fouled the air, I realized that it wasn’t the smell of animal dung drifting through the house that caught my attention. It was human. And if teachers would only tell high school boys and girls that when they become parents they will develop the ability to not only discern the difference between the smell of animal poop and human poop, but also the difference between each individual child’s aroma, and that this new found ability will become so ingrained that they never question how or why they are doing what they are doing, there’d be a whole lot less teenaged fornication goin’ on!

But, I digress.

It was readily apparent that I was the only person who could smell the offense. An investigation was in order. I briefly considered calling in the coon hound to track the origins of the malodorous breeze, but to her the smell I was smelling was neither new nor interesting. Considering the fact that she sniffs the canine nether regions of every dog she meets just as a matter of courtesy, and since I’ve smelled what the BFD produces, it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that the coon hound’s tracking ability is entirely shot.

But, here I go, wandering off on another tangent.

Using the process of elimination (rimshot! - Thank you, I'll be here all week), I traced the smell to the master bathroom, the last known location of Major Havoc before he joined his mother on the couch to read a book. The floor of the bathroom was covered with little wads of toilet paper. There was foulness attached the edge of the rug and on the linoleum. It looked like someone pulled the strings of roughly a hundred plastic Champaign bottle party poopers at some sick, twisted, six-year-old’s Fourth of July celebration. For the life of me, I could not figure out how he managed to smear the things he smeared on the places that he smeared them without also tracking it through the house. So, I did the only thing that a parent can do in this situation. I asked him.

“Major, did you have an accident in the bathroom?”

“No,” he replied.

Allow me to save you from the entire conversation. Spare me the difficulty of trying to describe the gesticulations that the boy employed in attempting to explain his bathroom antics. There was nothing “accidental” in what he did. The boy decided that rather than wiping and dropping the little ball of Charminy nastiness in the toilet, it would be fun to stand up, close his eyes, and toss the wad of spent white absorbency over his shoulder and HOPE that it landed in the bowl. If it didn’t…oh well, no points for you on that shot, buddy! It was obvious from the collection on the floor that he didn’t win the kewpie doll last night. And it simply never occurred to him to pick up after himself!

From where does this insanity come?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time cleaning the bathroom last night…
　
　
　


(sigh)