Strollerderby : bathroom

Another Four-Letter Word My Kid Can't Say

JeanneSager — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:27:00 GMT

Carlin had his seven dirty words. At my house, we have an eighth.

Turd.

My daughter will not, cannot, should not say it. Nor my husband for that matter.

The word panties makes my colleague Madeline, get the creepy crawlies. But the four-letter T-word for poop just makes me wrinkle up my nose and gag.

It's not what it stands for - although, to be fair, I'm no more a fan of that than I am of the other "gift" left in children's diapers. But poop is poop. And I grew up in the land of dairy cows. We have our share of chicken farms. Trust me, I've smelled some of the worst of it.

It's the word that I find cringe-tastic. It's a noxious, base way of referring to something that we all know is pretty loathesome to begin with. That it's the kind of word you hear used derisively on the playground doesn't help. "C'mere you little turd!" will never pass as a term of endearment.

Yet, it's a perfectly average word. One that a teacher can hardly fault a child for using, one that many people drop into conversation in mixed company, at least into conversations regarding the use of the facilities. Banning my daughter from using it might seem to some to be extreme. I say it's no more odd than my parents' insistence that my little brother and I refrain from ever uttering the word "fart" (which my husband found uproarious when we first started dating - he'd say it just to get a rise out of me).

What are the commonly used (even on the radio) words that you won't let your kids use?

Image: PoopReport

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10 Things They Don’t Tell You about Parenting

Cole Gamble — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:30:00 GMT

There are a lot of things I expected with parenting. Poop, various smells, sleepless nights. There were also a lot of things that I heard happened that I thought couldn’t possibly happen to me: tight knot in the stomach every time you hear a sad news story about a child, talking about your kids with your non-breeding friends.

Craig Playstead came up with a master list of the things you probably didn’t see coming before the baby arrived.

1) The way you view the world changes

When you bring someone into this world, things like global warming, war and women in beer ads have a whole new meaning. You start actually looking at the impact these things have, and what the world will become after you're dead and gone. Leaving a better place for your kids and grandkids becomes more than just talk.

2) You'll feel like a failure

There will be times when no matter how hard you try, your kids are never happy. You feel you're telling them “no” too much, constantly harping on them to clean their room, or dashing their dreams of lowering their brother down the staircase on a rope. While they may complain they don't have a Wii or that “so and so's” mom let's them see PG-13 movies, you need to stick to what you believe in and what you feel is best for your kids.

3) You have no time

This seems obvious, but you can't believe just how little time you have. You start to measure things out in minutes and seconds. “If he watches Curious George for 20 more seconds, I can go to the bathroom,” or “If his nap lasts another 10 minutes, maybe I can get in a shower today.”

4) Not going to the bathroom by yourself

When your kids are babies, the bathroom is the only place you can get your head together. It's also one of the only places you can actually read. I read ESPN's Bill Simmons' entire book over the course of the week in the bathroom when my youngest was a baby. And then he turned two. If he's not forcing his way in to watch “how it's really done” he's banging on the door screaming “let me in!” or sliding all his books underneath. There is no peace with toddlers.

5) Parenthood will turn you soft

This one hits the guys especially hard. You'll find yourself tearing up at any dumb movie that has anything to do with parenthood, and if you have a daughter, don't be surprised to find yourself playing “My Little Pony” before heading off to work. The icing on the cake is hawking Girl Scout cookies in front of your local grocery store annually.

The rest of Craig's list lives here.

Should Cameras be Allowed in School Bathrooms?

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 20:30:00 GMT

How would you feel about sending your daughter to a school that had cameras installed in the girls’ bathroom? Not good, if you’re anything like Anthony White, who withdrew his 14-year-old daughter from a Wales school after he learned that the girls’ bathroom had been equipped with cameras to prevent “horseplay.”

I can understand White's outrage. The school’s response to his concerns about his daughter’s privacy seems so willfully ignorant as to be creepy. Officials claim that the cameras were installed due to reports that soap and paper towels were being misused (the horror!), and the bathrooms are now much cleaner.

"Toilets can be areas where misbehavior occurs," officials calmly explained to the outraged father. True, but I would argue that hidden cameras in teen girls’ restrooms can also be “areas where misbehavior occurs."

Photo: BBC

Parents Upset: Transgender Kids Use Different School Bathrooms

JeanneSager — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:33:00 GMT

Uncomfortable kids in a bathroom or locker room? Who knew? That's the reason two California parents think their junior high should ban transgendered kids from using the facilities of the gender with which they associate. . . . because their own kids might feel "uncomfortable."

The district is fighting back (phewwww) because they say discomfort on the behalf of one individual does not qualify as a reason to deny another his or her constitutional rights not to be discriminated against. Score one for San Rafael school administrators.

The policy allows kids who have made the permanent switch to another gender (not necessarily sexual reassignment surgery, but presenting oneself as that particular gender) to use the girls bathroom if the identify themselves as girls or to change clothes in a boys locker room if they identify themselves as boys. In the case of changing clothes, they can choose to do so behind a curtain for additional privacy. State law protects gender and sexual identity, and the district isn't the first in California to allow for transgendered students to make choose their own facilities. Three other districts - including San Francisco - have adopted similar rules.

So what's the big deal? These parents say to expect boys to change with a young woman present - albeit behind a curtain - is imposing on their "modesty and dignity." In a very small way, I can see that. Kids in middle school are going through an incredibly tough time - they're touchy about EVERYTHING.

But transgendered kids are kids too. Once they begin telling the world they are of a certain gender, those that have made the switch entirely (the kids who the policy is built around) are making an attempt to live in one gender. If the other kids watch a "girl" named Jane walk into the boys bathroom, all her hard work to live comfortably in her own skin will come undone. "She" will be uncomfortable; what's more, she will have her rights to be protected from discrimination violated.

I'm also hard-pressed to see how it's any more uncomfortable to change in front of someone who is walking around acting like they're the same sex as you than it is to change in front of someone who has the same parts "down there" as you do. Kids in middle school, for the most part, still change very quickly in the locker room with their eyes downward (at least they did in my school). Are we going to start separating out the gay kids next because homophobic kids are "uncomfortable" imaging they're being looked at?

What these parents need to do is educate their kids on what transgender means, specifically the fact that these kids are not just cross dressing. They are specifically living their lives in another gender, the same gender as the kids sharing their bathrooms and locker rooms. Or maybe these parents are the ones who need an education?

Image: Amazon

Source: Mercury News

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More Stuff Parents Dream About: Being Alone in the Bathroom

JeanneSager — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 16:02:00 GMT

It took me a long time until I could poop in my husband's presence. Now I long for the days when it was just him, me and a can of cinnamon apple spray.

Sound familiar?

I haven't been alone in a bathroom since before the kid was born, before the cats came to live with us, before the dog wormed her way into my heart. We have what we call the "don't bother shutting the door because it's not going to stay that way policy" on the bathroom now. I considered a lock, but what's the point? She'd just stand there, banging on the wood and yelling, "Mommy, are you in there? Are you Mommy? Mommy???"

No, you watched me walk in, shut the door, unzip my pants and let them drop to the floor. I'm not in here. I've moved to Australia.

"Mommy, I have to go potty," she'll say, because at 3, that still gets everyone's attention.

She doesn't usually. Although she'll make a big to do out of pulling down first the pants, then her underwear and wiggling the naked butt around the room before finally settling it on her little potty. Then she'll pop back up. "Nope, don't have to." Sometimes she'll ask, "Are you done peeing yet?" and order me off the "big potty" so she can have a turn. No dice there either. That I still haven't peed and am thisclose to wetting myself is secondary to the careful selection of just the right square of toilet paper, the proper wiping technique, the flushing, the help climbing down. I'm thinking of a Depends investment.

I dream of a day my waste won't be inspected, waved at, bid goodbye before it's flushed away. I yearn to know that I can wash my hands without "help," to know that I can do it all by myself. I don't care that "Miss Phyllis says you have to rub-a-dub-dub." Miss Phyllis can spin for all I care.

Really, all I'd like is a little privacy for my lady parts and the not-so-lady-like moments they might have. I guess I should have thought about that before I handed them over to the very un-lady-like process of childbirth, huh?

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Mom and Dad Are Arguing About Girls and Boys

Kelly Mills — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 23:23:00 GMT

You know we Derby queens love DadCentric, we really do. We totally have a hard-on for those guys. But like all good relationships, there are times when we don't see eye-to-eye and have to respectfully disagree. A recent advice post was one of those occasions when we say "tomato" and the DadC's say "tomahto," and I think we all know what the correct pronounciation is here. Anyhow, a reader wrote in and asked if her son's seeming lack of empathy and frequent unprovoked head-butting was just a case of "boys will be boys." Dad Jason responded that boys are kinda like that, and, "Girls, from what I've seen of my friends' female kids, are decidedly more genteel... boys, in my experience, like to run into walls and talk about bodily functions. This does not end at 3, or 5, or 38."

Ahem. I'm raising a girl, and I know she's a girl because she likes to talk loudly about her vagina, then she snickers. She also frequently cracks (tee hee) jokes about poop and butts. She did tell me one of her friends hit her, but when pressed for details it came out that he was standing up for his buddy after my kid kicked him for no reason, yelling a menacing "Hi-ya!" Amy K. here has a girl who tackles and sprints and makes fart jokes. And Madeline shared this tidbit about her brood: "They were chanting "penis! penis!" one day so much that I told them I didn't want to hear it again for the rest of the day. My compliant 6 year old got silent but my two year old stopped for a second and then started chanting "poonis, poonis, poonis!" Lost on a technicality! We try to keep the windows closed."

My point is that I think the girl-boy differences are perhaps a question of social conditioning, but an equally likely explanation is that when boys do this stuff it is attributed to the fact that they are boys. I also wondered if perhaps some parents train this stuff out of girls, but that maybe other moms and dads are somewhat more tolerant of poop humor and so on in their little ladies. Then I realized I had participated in a number of e-mail threads with the Derby-ers that day that centered around penis jokes and crass references. So it might just be us Strollers, cuz, you know, girls (plus two guys) will be girls.

I just don't believe it's a boy thing. And I've got the vagina jokes to prove it.