Tonight I had my worst toddler bathroom experience. Ever. We went to Short Sands at York Beach this evening with the Roberges to play at the playground. The beach has a public bathroom but it is closed due to construction. In its place are about ten porta-potties. We all know where this is going. Zach needed to go to the bathroom so I grabbed our backpack and headed over to the line of plastic chemical thrones.
The units on the end were wheelchair accessible and thus more roomy so I decided to hit one of those first. The first door I opened revealed a pile of toilet paper almost coming out of the toilet so that was a “no”. I headed to the other end only to find a wet slimy pile of human feces sitting in the middle of the floor. A standard unit it is.
This toilet was not much better – toilet paper on the floor, lots of stuff in the toilet piled up – but i was going to make it work. Zach didn’t have shoes on so I could’t put him on the floor… not that there was any room anyway. I set him up next to the toilet seat in the corner of the room and told him to hold onto the vent pipe so he didn’t fall in. I put our potty seat on the toilet and got Zach ready to go. The instant I put him on the seat he began screaming and squirming in terror. I pick him up in his hysteria, pants at his ankles and begin pleading with him to tell me whats wrong. While this is all happening the timer on my phone goes off incessantly to remind me that I need to put money in the parking meter. This couldn’t get any worse.
Apparently Zach thought the nasty toilet was going to eat him or was freaked out by the amount of toilet paper that was literally everywhere. Regardless of the reason, he refused to use the bathroom. Since I didn’t want this half-naked child to pee all over me I decided to convince him to use the little urinal that is standard on all of the high-end plastic chemical toilets. Luckily he agreed, he peed, and we managed not to get any of it on ourselves. As we left Zach said “That potty is dorty. Ewww. Somebody needs to kween it” while I looked at the completely empty “maintenance log”, ironically the cleanest surface in that thing.
That was such a nasty experience. I think I’d rather change a kid who wet himself than go through that again. Ugh.
Relatively Ambitious 