Welcome to Turdsalot

[Clever intro I can't think of right now.]
Ahem. (Cough cough)

Parenting teen and young adult males: Part 2

Poo

This week son #4 used a term for which I have been searching for years.  I didn't know I was looking for this term until he used it. A term that encompasses what it means to live in a world of constant discussion -- and performance -- of bodily functions.  See, as one of five girls, I most assuredly did not grow up in a house where discussions of fecal matter, expectoration, or flatulence were allowed, let alone common.  We had acceptable terms for bodily waste that only vaguely alluded to that actual matter involved.  I genuinely never gave the matter any amount of significant consideration beyond "Poop is gross.  Let's talk about something else."  Years later when my own children were potty training, I used the term "tinkle" in a conversation with another mother who was a native of Israel.  She gave me a blank look.  

"She did . . . what?" She asked.

"You know, she tinkled."  I responded, caught a bit unprepared to define this term.  Discussing urine with causal acquaintances was new to me at this point in my parenting experiences.  (Later I would discover the joy of discussing all matter of human waste with complete strangers.  This is what raising boys brings you to.)

"She was sparkly?"

"No, um, you know, she peed."

She looked at me again, completely devoid of both expression and comprehension.  "Why do you call it that?"

"Because of the sound it makes?"  Truthfully I had never given it a thought.  We had just always called it tinkle.  But now I had images of sparkly little rainbow pools in the toilet.  Both intriguing and disturbing.

She gave a hesitant nod and we moved on with the conversation, which was obviously so stunning that now, twenty five years later, I can only remember the portion that had to do with urine.  Stellar.

Tinkle was the only acceptable term for urine in the home I grew up in.  "Pee" was along the lines of a four-letter word.  This should give you an idea of the level of allowable phrases for other bodily functions.  Poop was only ever called a "BM" (bowel movement, for those who missed out on this bit of 1960-70's vocabulistics) but for some reason, a fart was when someone needed to make a "poopy."  Now, maybe it's just me, but when I really give a moment to thinking about the term BM, it's really soooooo much grosser than the term poop.  Which, now I think about it, is along the onomatopoeic lines of tinkle.  And let's not even start with farting being "needing to make a poopy."  Because that's just a shart, which is waaaaaay worse than plain old flatulence.  The 70's really don't make a lot of sense on so many levels.

At any rate, I was more than unprepared on the vocabulary front to raise boys.  (The list of areas on which I was unprepared to raise boys would look not unlike a chart of our galaxy.  In this case, ignorance seriously saved my sanity.  Except I'm not really sane.  So, maybe not. Blissfully nuts?  I can go with that.). I had no and I mean NO idea of the amount of brain space the male of our species gives to bodily functions.  Happily and enthusiastically so.  Like, shopping-for-shoes-at-an-amazing-sale-and-a-fab-coupon level of enthusiasm.  For the better of part of three decades I have been dropped in to this world earthy glee.

I. Do. Not. Get. It.

So when Jonathan used this term the other day, it caught my attention.  I looked at him, mildly confused.  Random fecal words are now a common and largely unnoticed part of my day.  This one was new and unknown to me.

"What?"

Jonathan grins.  "Turdsalot.  You know, like Camelot."

Please allow a moment of contemplation here. . . .  This moment needs to be noted and recorded for posterity.  This moment is when I finally have a word to describe the world I live in.

TURDSALOT

Oh how I wish I was musical.  I could whip up some fantastic parodies of the musical with new poo-inspired lyrics and with some slick home videos shot on the throne.  (Get it?  Throne?  Cause it's Turdsalot? Like Camelot has a real throne but in my world it's the ceramic type? Get it? Get it?) It would need to be pretty awesome with super elementary school-era costumes and bad acting, with an off-key piano for accompaniment.  It's all so real in my head.  Because it's so real in my real.  Here are some of the nobility who live in my kingdom.

Sir TMI -- Color, content, quantity.  After every visit to the WC. Please don't. We don't want to know.  Ever. And yet we get thrice-daily reports. And after eating an entire box of Cap'n Crunch, the descriptive enthusiasm brings to mind religious fervor.  But more smelly.  Cheap fruit snacks can go neon. One has to wonder what early food scientists thought when these unexpected side affects began cropping (crapping?) up.

Sir Deadly -- You've heard the term "silent but deadly?" It was invented for the Davis boys.  Literally, they have cleared classrooms.  They thought it was hilarious.  The teachers did not.  ("Um, what are you feeding him?" Real question from a real teacher.)

Sir Boastful -- There is NO reason, I repeat NO reason to proudly Instagram the size of your leavings.  You think I am kidding.  I am not.  And apparently, "mudding" on another person is an indication of claiming victory over them.  This is something one declares loudly at the beginning of pretty much any sort of contest. Again, I have no idea. WhoWhatWhereWhenWhy = Nope.

Sir Descriptive -- Did you know you can replace about any noun in any song with a synonym for poop?  And verb?  And adjective?  Frequently all in the same sentence.  (I guess I should be happy they know their parts of speech but I'm having problems working up the energy to cheer.) And then sing about it for days on end?  Did you know you can make up entirely new songs about pooping?  Why would anyone want to, you ask?  I have no earthly . . . I just  . . . No.  

Sir Constant -- Poop. Crap. Plop. Poo. Dump. Dookie. Float a log. Drop a load. Turd. Toilet muffin. Mud.  Groundhogging. (When the poop is trying to come out but you aren't to the toilet yet.)  Little turtle.  (Constipation. As in "I gotta trick my poop into coming out so it doesn't stick out its little arms and stop itself.  Like a little turtle.") Ok I gotta stop.  I'm grossing myself out trying to remember every clever way they've come up with to refer to fecal matter.  But somehow, they have a never-ending supply of vocabulary words in this category.  Why on earth can they not turn their powers to broader horizons and knock the SAT out of the ballpark?  Sigh.

On the one hand, I totally understand that voiding one's bowels is one of the great common equalizers of humanity.  We all do it and there is absolutely no way to make it cool or suave.  I don't care how large the cadre of handlers and estheticians a celebrity has, he or she poops the same as every last person on the planet and it ain't pretty.  So I guess there is something unifying in that.  But we all breathe and sleep and eat, so I would think that of the four options, pooping is the least desirable.  Truly I would rather bond over the love of good food than of the satisfaction of a large BM.  Yet I have heard way more conversations on the later in Turdsalot than the former among the knighthood. Waaaaay more.

So here I am.  Queen of Turdsalot.  Trying to kick each of the knights out as quickly as possible before my gag reflex is permanently stuck in the "on" position. They have this way of sneaking in the back door when I'm not looking.  But I will get them all out in the end.  And then, AND THEN, we will renovate and I will be . . .

QUEEN OF CHOCOTOPIA!!! 

Swamp Monkeys

You can hear crying.  It sounds like . . . like a toddler or a child?  It's coming from the wooded area across the field.  The swampy area.  You hate that area.  There are snakes and crawling, slimy things over there.  The mosquitos redefine "unbearable" over there.  It's always either raining or about to rain.  And there's no real ground.  It's like mud that can't quite get its act together so it just sloshes around among the rocks and tree roots.  It's the swamp.  Nature's landfill.  All the yuck settles here.  People only go there when there is no other option.  That appears to the be the case now.

You follow the sound across the field and into the swamp.  You've brought your knee-high rubber boots and hope you won't have to go back and get the waist-high waders. But the crying continues and you solider on.  It gets louder and . . . odder.  The crying has overtones of screeching.  Almost like nails on a blackboard?  It both raises the level of alarm within you and also snags your curiosity.  What on earth is going on in that swamp?!

Another minute slogging nearly knee-deep through what looks like moldy carpet brings the sound louder and clearer.  There is a scraggly tree up ahead.  At some point in the past lightning struck and killed off most of it, but a branch here and there hangs on.  There, on one of the mostly-alive branches, draped with moss and alien-appearing lichen, is the source of the crying.  It's not a toddler, which is good.  Because how on earth would a baby get out here in the first place?  It's a little monkey.  Monkies belong in swamps, yes? Well, no.  Not really.  At least not in twenty-first century North America, last time you checked Google for . . . monkies.  Ok, it's fair to say you have never done an internet search for North American monkies, but you'd be willing to bet your Sane Grown Up card monkies don't normally live here.  You look closer.  Especially not monkies with sparkly collars and name tags.  This little guy belongs to someone.

You slowly approach and get a better look at the creature.  You're no zoologist, but the monkey seems particularly small and fuzzy.  So, it's not a human baby, but it is a baby.  Your heart melts a little.  This poor tiny thing is just a baby and it's lost and trapped.  It's a sure bet it got itself out here, probably jumping from tree to tree, not giving a single thought to where its going, just enjoying the freedom of motion and movement.  And then all of a sudden it realized it was stuck on this raggedy tree, in the middle of yuck.  Poor baby.

You reach up to the little monkey and it scampers higher up the tree, panicking because it's scared and freaking out.  You can see its real terror and your heart breaks a little more for it.  With a soft voice and gentle motions, you convince it to creep out on the limb to you.  It hesitates and then scampers up your arm.  And clamps on to the top of your head.  Up until now, you have no personal experience with the term "death grip."  Now you do.  It means the type of grip where the gripee imbeds every possible attachment point in to the object of perceived safety.  In this case, your scalp and neck.  It's quite surprising how much pain can be sensed by the scalp.  You remind yourself that this little creature is a just a baby and its terrified.  And scalps heal. 

With slow steps, you begin making your way back across the green murky stretch of swamp back to dry land.  You're a bit shocked when you look up and realize you walked quite a bit farther than you thought you had.  Of course, on the way out, you didn't have twenty tiny claws digging into your head.  That probably affects perceived time.  Like, when you're in the dentist's chair and, between the dentist and his assistant, there are probably elevent different foreign objects being jabbed into your sensitive gums and he says, "Almost done," and then you feel actual continental drift happen before he starts removing his tools from your face?  That kind of perceived time.

Around the third step, the fuzzy baby monkey decides he needs to start serenading your travels together.  It's a repetitive shriek that hits the required sound wave length to send a spike straight from your ear to your entire spine.  Every 1.4 seconds.  You coo and try to quiet the little creature but it just thinks you're joining in and it shrieks louder and adds a few hoots for added fun.  But, the sounds seem to calm it and it relaxes its grip on your head.  So, it's a win of sorts.

It relaxes a bit more and starts to bounce and hoot at the same time.  While the sound and motion grate on your nerves, the monkey does pull out the rest of the claws.  It also starts to swish its tail around.  It discovers it can wrap its tail around you, in fact.  Right around your face and over your eyes.  It discovers this just as you are about to step over a dead log in the mud.  With right leg lifted, you suddenly lose sight and inhale monkey fur seasoned with poo. Since not even Spider-Man could have maintained both his cool and his balance at this point, and you are quite certain you are not Spider-Man, you stumble.  Your shin rediscovers the fallen log and you are pretty sure you're about to get a face full of mud when your fall is stopped by your knee collapsing on to the dead log.  So, you've traded mud up the nose for probable below the knee paralysis.  A draw, then?  

The sudden altitude shift has caused your passenger to re-secure its position atop your cranium with all available attachment options, with the tail now being wrapped around your neck.  But at least you can see.  It occurs to you that you don't have to be doing this and that you outweigh the monkey by a factor of a thousand.  Maybe a million.  Math isn't your strong suit.  One thing you do know is one grab and fling of your arm and this would be over with.  You could probably be home and in a nice warm shower within the hour.  Then a tiny little face lowers itself down over your eyes and looks at you.  "Eep?" It asks in a little voice.  And you make the deadly mistake of looking it in the eyes.  There is real fright there.  And confusion.  It really is just a baby.  It doesn't mean to be stabbing you with multiple implements of torture, causing you pain that will probably keep you up at nights for the next week.  It just is.  You sigh and pull yourself up.

Several millennia later, you reach the . . . well, "shore" doesn't really work when you're talking about a swamp, so we'll say more solid sludge, and you shake off the excess ick from your legs.  Little monkey has once again calmed down and has returned to adding its own sound track to your journey.  Your progress on to solidity causes it to take notice of its surroundings and it spots a tree not far away with ripe fruit.  Without a backward glance, it springs from your head, taking great care to anchor itself securely to your hair follicles before leaping.  You watch it bound away, trailing significant locks of your hair as it goes.  In another moment, it is sitting up in a branch bouncing happily and munching fruit.  You walk over to it and look up.

What are you expecting?  Well, you don't know.  It's a swamp monkey, after all.  They don't talk, so it's not going to sing weeping praises of your bravery in saving it.  They don't shop at Godiva, so you can be pretty certain not to expect a thank you gift.  And if it could write, you're quite certain any thank you note it might send would be written in an "ink" you would not prefer.  But something, dang it.  That little beast literally drew blood from your body and used you as a ferry.  Ok, yes, you offered yourself as a ferry because it was tiny and small and scared.  You sigh and look up once more at it.  It blows a raspberry at you.  You give it a frown and move to turn.  But just before you do, it leaps down from the branch, wraps its little arms around you and smooshes its little face into your cheek.  You pat it on its little head and then it hops back up into the tree.  A warm happy feeling floods your being and you know for a moment what joy is.  You smile and turn away, feeling the depth of happiness all humans feel when they know they have done good.  Your chest still feels warm and you wonder at the lingering emotion.  You look down.  The swamp monkey has crapped on you.

And that, my friends, is life with a middle schooler.  

CIA Interrogation Techniques and Other Helpful Study Tips

Having just successfully booted yet another of my offspring out o' the house, I feel a need to do a series of posts about parenting boys through teens and into early adult years.  THIS however, would not just be a series of posts or even an entire book, but an entire ENCYCLOPEDIA series worth of posts.  So I'm gunna have to break it down a bit.

Part 1: Mangled Speech

Everyone loves how two and three year-olds wrestle with the truly complex task of verbal communication.  Think about it-- we expect our toddlers to accomplish in a few years what literally billions of years of evolution and development in the non-human animal kingdom has yet to accomplish.  Yes, yes, I know whales have complex communication systems and apes have learned ASL, but I'm saving my respect for the beastie or birdie that can tell decent Knock Knock joke.  So it's easily to be expected that a creature who has yet to manage not messing their pants might come up with beauties like "motowheezer" (lawn mower) or "wedgewant" (restaurant). 

When the confused conversicant is, however, of a double digit age, the mangling of words takes on an entirely new delightfulness.  It's generally not a massive mispronunciation of a few phonetic combinations or an added syllable, but a compete replacement of a word or phrase for one that is *almost* a synonym. But not.  

I give you "Driving To School Friday Morning."

My standard issue Mom Van is in the shop for a myriad of problems, all necessary for legal vehicle operation, none life-threatening.  Sadly.  (Except I really like not having a car payment and, as I said, it runs fine.  It just doesn't have a passenger side head light that can stay functional for more than two days or a passenger side brake like that works.  Not really decent excuses to buy a new car.  Dang it.) For this reason, we are taking the Kid Car to do morning school drop offs.  Kid Car has most recently been captained by the child who has just been booted out the door.  Owing to previous bootees not getting a car Freshman year of college, this Bootee was sent similarly un-vehicled on his way to pursue a higher education. This is not to say that said offspring took the time to clean up the Kid Car before handing it down to the next offspring.  Indeed, no, it appeared that Recent Bootee did all he could to turn the Kid Car into a full-fledged Rolling Landfill for the Future Bootee who will obtain his Learner's Permit next month.  Negotiations are being attempted at acquiring a less disgusting Kid Car.  These negotiations will fail.

Thus we were all performing our own separate archeological expeditions as we attempted to find the purported seats with which the Kid Car was said to have been equipped.  They were duly found, the worst of the garbage was lassoed and corralled into the trash can, (If you think vocabulary choices implying the trash was both alive and also moving vigorously enough on its own to require active collection are incorrect, you clearly do not have teens who drive.) and seats were taken.  As we made our way to the high school for the first drop off, further excavations were made of the items which had not immediately fallen out of the car when the doors were opened.

There was, on the dashboard, a full water bottle with a pencil in it.  It had been there all summer. I had seen it every time I had walked by the Kid Car on the way to the mailbox.  I cringed every time I saw it and told myself to unlock the car and remove the nasty looking water bottle.  Sadly, the lengthy journey across the driveway was much too long for my brain to remember a one-item to-do list and thus the Water Bottle au Pencil remained.  

As we were driving, we could not immediately throw it away.  It was therefore duly inspected.  The winner of Shot Gun gave it a look before the Back Seat claimed it.

"What the heck?"  A reasonable question.

"I have no idea, ask Jacob." I answer.

And thus the Back Seat snapped a pic of the item and sent it to his older brother via the marvel that is modern digital communication.  I expected either no answer or  something rude in response.

I was happily incorrect.

"It's a science experiment!" Back Seat exclaimed.

"What?"

"Ya, he wants to see how long it takes for the pencil to completely dissolve.  Or if it even will dissolve."

Huh.  Well, I now understand why it was on the dash board where heat and sunlight could work most effectively.  I am impressed.  Still a bit grossed out, but definitely aglow in the renewed awareness that my child is not just the collection of bodily functions and hormones he appears to be.  Granted, it still falls in the category of "Let's see if we can make this gross thing happen" that fuels most all teen boy action, but still.  There does appear to be a brain in there.

Then Shot Gun asks, "So he's just water boarding a pencil."

(Pause.)

"What?" I ask.

"He's water boarding a pencil.  You know, just seeing how much water he can get the pencil to soak up."  He says, with an air of "duh, Mom."

(Second Pause.)

"Water LOG.  He's water logging a pencil."

"Same thing."

Almost . . . but . . . no.  I am intrigued, however, by the idea of water boarding a pencil.  I can see it now . . . .

A group of frantic high school juniors are gathered in a dark basement, a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling.  Their eyes are blood shot from hours spent poring over Wikipedia pages and Spark Notes summaries.  Their hands are shaking from a week-long diet of Doritos and Monster drinks.  They are wearing smelly, wrinkled clothing because they have been up for two days straight, trying to cram an entire semester into 36 hours.  They are desperate and it has come to this.

In the midst of their frenetic, anxious circle is a table.  On that table is a popsicle stick held up by a couple of bent 3x5 cards pulled from an old Spanish vocab flash card set.  A Ticonderoga #2, dull and battered, is strapped to the popsicle stick with a frayed hair tie pulled from a pseudo man-bun one of the juniors has been trying to grow all year.

A female junior leans closer, her mouth open and her breath coming in short, ragged gasps.  A drop of sweat rolls down her temple as she pushes her glasses back up her nose.  She holds up a pipette, purloined from the AP Chemistry classroom.  It is full of water and her finger holds one end, stopping the fluid from rushing forth.

"You can see we're serious," her voice wavers.  "We KNOW you have the data we need."

"Do it now!" A short, plump student growls.  "Enough questions!"  She lifts in her inhaler and takes a sharp puff.

"But we don't have the information yet," another student wails, wringing his hands.  "I only have three pages done!  I NEED 800 MORE WORDS!!"  He pulls at his hair and grimaces with brace-adorned teeth.

"Calm down!" The pipette-wielder yells.  "Our friend Ticonderoga is smart," she continues in a calmer voice.  

The pencil says nothing.

"It knows tomorrow is the last day of the semester."  A tic starts to pulse under the student's left eye.  

Silence continues.

She raises her hand.  "It knows we are desperate and out of time."  

The pencil continues mute.

Her hand begins to shake.  "It knows WE know all good pencils have the secret of the Perfect Essay imbedded in their cores."  

There is no answer.

Her finger tenses.  "It WILL give us the correct answers for our scan trons!"

And she lifts her finger.

We'll be sure to let you know if the pencil gives up the goods.  Or dissolves.