Toddlers, well, sometimes they just plain suck

It is disturbing how acclimated I am to digging my hands in poo.

Ginger is in the beginning stages of potty-training and is justifiably fascinated by the toilet. When you are watching that means she will sit on it and *try* to go, and/or flush it and wave bye-bye.

If you take your eyes off her, she will dump everything in reach into the water. I have reached in and recovered necklaces, aquarium rocks, plain ol' rocks, toys, socks, toilet paper rolls, hair bands, and much, much more from the toilet. And yes, once or twice she did this, no one caught her, and then a kid 'did their business' and yelled for me to remove the items when the water was already . . . used.

Whatever. It's still got to be more sanitary than the grunge apparel I wore in college.

And - for those without kids or a meager one or two to worry about - I'm not about to 'lock' the toilet, or child-proof it, or any such thing. I'd rather auger out a toilet anyday than deal with one of the older kids wetting the floor because they couldn't get the lock off. And who are we kidding? At 3 a.m I'd be the one pi**ing on the floor.

What's worse is that she now removes her diaper at will. An hour ago, with YaYa and Smily out of the house visiting Grandma, I went up to clean Ginger's room and recover the latest round of 'missing' diapers. I found them alright, tucked behind the crib, alongside the dress-up box, etc. Nasty.

Anyhow, while I'm cleaning her room she waddles out and down the hall. Five minutes pass. That's it. Five minutes. I get set to go downstairs and just happen to see Ginger in YaYa's room.

Then I saw the fish bowl. Or what's was left of it.

She had dumped pencils, two NEW bottles of fish food, a necklace, a coloring book, and a bunch of junk into the bowl. It was so full of debris most of the water had been forced out onto the desk and floor, and there was no room for the fish to live -absolutely no chance it had survived.

And yet, in a tiny pocket of water in the corner, it calmly treaded water.

I yelled for LuLu, pretty dang sure she wouldn't answer. She'd been a pain in the keister in the half-hour before, and I was certain she'd interpret my cries as a continuation of my lectures. I was wrong. "What's wrong Daddy!?" she said, and quickly ran off to grab a temporary bowl.

Here I sit, ten minutes later, the bowl clean and the fish restored, hoping the trauma wasn't enough to kill off YaYa's pet.

"If it dies," LuLu said, matter-of-factly, "YaYa's gonna kill us both."

"Yes, honey," I said. "I'm aware of that."


* * * *

One more compliment to LuLu. Yesterday she dutifully reported that the stand-up freezer in the basement had been left open and that it didn't seem to be working.

Before I'd left for work that morning I'd sent one of our friend Chris' kids down there to put something away, so it had been ajar for ten hours or so. The light *was* burnt out, some items were defrosted, and the unit (which was my Grandma's, and conservatively 30 years old) had been working overtime so long it wasn't running very well.

It's fine now, but if LuLu had kept quiet . . .oh man.

Later, she also came up to me and told me I'd left the van lights on. Score two saves for LuLu.

And today she recovered a pair of new sunglasses of mine that Ginger had walked away with yesterday.

She is, without question, our resident "Finder".