Eau de toilet

Which in our house literally means Eew! The Toilet!!

My baby just turned a year old.  I officially have a toddler on my hands.  Lord help us all!  This kid never sits still.  He's on the go CONSTANTLY.  And into every freaking nasty, gross thing that he can get his chubby little hands on.  And the grandparents spoil him with toys, books, anything his little heart could want.  He doesn't want any of it.

What does he want to play with?  The TOILET!  We're not nasty people by any means.  Far from it.  But I'm also not a bleach-toting spaz, either.  We straddle that middle line and every once in a while when the kids have worn my resistance down to a nub, something passes a smell test to determine its use.

I know he loves the water.  He showers with my hubby at night before bed and gets excited the SECOND he hears the release of the water out of the faucet.  We even bought him one of those tiny molded plastic baby pools from Wally-World.  It's the one you can only put a few inches of water into because it's just big enough to him wet but not much more.  His favorite thing to do with that is crawl out of it.  He doesn't want to play in it.  At all.  (The only day I saw him give the pool anything more than a passing glance, was when he saw our neighbor's baby was making a beeline for it.  Then he was all over that thing - and relieved her of her toys!)  Until today.  We have a Bradford Pear tree in our front yard.  It's just big enough to house a few birds and a feeder, and offer a little bit of shade on our front lawn.

Because we haven't been playing any where near the pool (why would we? The weather's only been in the 90's around here with 100% humidity), today I noticed that the birdies we've been feeding have been using the pool for their own personal dumping ground!  They've been pooping on the pool and spitting bird seed shells into it!  It turned from a nice safe place for my son to have some supervised water play, into a birdie landfill!  So, what draws my son like a magnet?  That nasty, disgusting pool.  So I pulled out the heavy artillery and got to scrubbing.  I scrubbed that thing until I was certain that every last bit of birdie debris was obliterated.  Baby thought it was great!  He thought I created all that foam just for him to play in. Kept leaning over the side to get his hands full of suds.  Bird poop suds.

After I got it all clean and shiny and added fresh water to the bottom of the pool (I could see my reflection when I looked in), I saw his diapered butt out of the corner of my eye bouncing up and down toward the flower beds - he was on his way to de-leaf them.  Or eat the dirt.  Or squash the bugs.  Hard to tell.  He didn't want a single thing to do with that pool.  I guess the allure was mixed in with the bird poop. 


Boys.