Yep! My ~18 month old son used the potty for the first time last night, after some months of us gradually introducing the concept to him. Hurrah! May pride in, erm, poop, soon follow.

Susan’s out of town on business so it’s just Brady and me this week. This morning, the following happened, beyond the normal ‘make breakfast and lunch for both of us, feed the dog and chickens, and get everyone bathed and dressed’:

• Second day in a row Brady didn’t like his breakfast, which had me scrambling to get food in him. Muffin ftw.
• I shave every other day, and today’s a shaving day. I leave Brady playing in the tub while I shave, during which the first poop emergency ensues – a floater, shouts of no touch, and emergency cleansing of boy, butt, and bathtub follows, whilst my face is half slathered in shaving cream.
• Inexplicably, while feeding the chickens and retrieving the eggs, the chickens attack me as part of a broader inter-chicken clan skirmish. This has never happened before – I’m shocked. The yellow rooster gets some good ones in on my leg, I nearly drop Brady, kick a rooster (it was unharmed and undaunted), and fail to notice one of the white hens concluding it’s better to flee and fight another day – it escapes the coop.
• While chasing the hen around Brady wanders into the garden and plays in the dirt, soiling basically all of himself. Fortunately chickens are dumb and I quickly corner and catch the escaped hen.
• Unfortunately, Brady also manages to soil lots of me when I retrieve him from the garden. So much for heading to work in clean clothes.
• Unbeknownst to me, while all of this is going on, Soolin finds some poop to roll in. I discover this after we’re all in the car and I realize that smell is not a dirty diaper. This is the second poop emergency.

Despite all of this, I was only 15 minutes late to work, and mostly I found it funny. But honestly, how do single parents do this day after day? My guess is, they don’t have chickens for starters.

It’s been clear for quite a while that Brady understands a lot of what he hears. On a whim I put this to the test this Sunday. He was taking a bath and playing with his toys. His current favorite bathtoy is the bottle his eye infection medication came in. He knows it’s called ‘bottle’ (that’s ‘baba’ to him), and he likes to fill it with water by submerging it then dumping it out. He seems to have a similarly impish sense of humor to my own, and will try to pour the water on me (always good for a giggle), or out of the tub if he’s bored or notices I have stopped paying attention to him. Anyway Sunday I asked him if he could ‘fill your bottle with water, then pour it on your hand?’ and was astounded when he did precisely that, twice, while looking at me with a quizzical expression, which I took to mean something like ‘ok yeah, but why, what does this mean, Dad? What’s the significance, and why are you laughing? Did you just trick me somehow?’ I told him it would help him clean his dirty hands, which caused him to do the rub hands/fingers together motions he does when we ask him to clean his hands. Oh, the mysteries of cognition. I LOVE this period of development in kids.

Heh. So my Dad came to visit for the weekend, and spent time coddling the toddler, and yet somehow we took exactly no pictures of him. How that was managed I have no idea, we even talked about needing to do it a couple of times. This post will have to suffice as the record of the visit. Brady was his usual little charmer. I loved watching him interact with Dad – he’d go over and test his theorems on him, like for example ‘da, wat dis!’ (holding up a toilet paper roll to me, say). ‘Toilet Paper roll!’ I’d tell him, at which point Brady would trundle over to Dad and hold it up and say ‘dis?’

I love this stage of development.

We didn’t do too much during the visit, a combination of the fact that Dad was still recovering from Australian Jet Lag and Susan and I are like a decade of recovering from ‘we’re parents of a toddler, and have 3 acres of land to tend to.’ That by way of saying, Dad slept a lot, and I had a bunch of chores, including mowing 1/3 of the lawn and finishing the frame for the enclosure on the new chicken coop and the roof and nesting box for the minicoop. Susan had garden work.

Dad did get to spend some time with Susan and Brady in Northampton, including lunch and the requisite shopping at the coop, which all seemed to enjoy, so at least we managed to do some quasi entertaining, even if I was stuck at work. Oh, and Dad and I took Brady to a playground on Sunday for a little sliding and swinging action. So – despite our various inadequacies as entertainers we’re still really glad he came, and after he left we swore to do better next time.

There’s one little coda, which is that Dad forgot his cellphone, and it was all I could do to resist the urge to prank it up, but I shipped it back to him intact with nary a bit of tinkering by me 😉