(7) Alright… Who Peed on the floor?!

I’ll always remember how old our first farm dog, a yellow lab named Lucy, is because the summer we got her, we were also potty training my youngest, Zander.

Before I begin my story, I have to disclose something about my parenting/potty training methods. Now, don’t judge me, I have only ever potty trained boys, and I have to say, the one sure fire way that we did it was “Naked Potty Training.” It is exactly what it sounds like! You let them run around stark naked. All of my boys were FULLY potty trained by 2 1/2 and I seriously credit this method for it. How it came about, I noticed that when they had clothes on, even just “underoos” (What we call underwear. I don’t even remember where that name came from…), they’d have accidents. However, when they were naked, like before or after a bath, they’d be able to tell me they had to go and they did not have accidents. So… because my boys enjoyed being naked 24/7 anyway, this was a no-brainer for me. **For anyone who knows their father, my husband, I blame him for them being tiny little nudists and I think you’d all agree ;)** Now, in public, it was another story, obviously they wore clothes. But as soon as they walked through the door at home they completely stripped down!  Anyway, naked potty training had much better “accident ratings” for us (very, very few), but was not perfect from the get-go obviously.

And… anyone who has ever potty trained a young puppy knows that you can’t turn your back for a second or you’ll be scrubbing puppy pee out of your carpet.  Same goes for tiny little naked potty training boys! There it is folks… 1 mommy vs. 1 naked potty training toddler and 1 potty training puppy… this inevitably will not end dry.  1 on 2, it’s not even a fair match up! Most of the time, when I found a puddle, I could eliminate one suspect because I was with one of them at the time of the “incident.” Most of the time, little Lucy was the culprit.

Back to pee on the floor… Here’s how it went down that day. Ryker (then age 4), was going to the bathroom, he’s our “newspaper reading” pooper. You know that one that takes 20, 30, 40 minutes… Every family has one, and he and my husband are ours. He occasionally needed help wiping still, and this day was one of those occasions. I left my bare bottomed 2-year-old, our new puppy, and my oldest, Hunter (then age 8), in the kitchen/living room area while I went help Ryker. When I returned, not more that two minutes later, there was a puddle… I asked Hunter who peed on the floor? He’d been watching cartoons after school and so of course he didn’t know. I looked at naked Zander, and asked him, “Who peed on the floor?” He just looked at me for a second… I re-phrased “Zander, did you pee on the floor?” He looked me square in the eye and replied confidently, “Nope!” So I asked him “Did Lucy pee on the floor?” He replied confidently, “Nope!” I decided to ask one more question, frankly just to see what he’d say, because my 2-year-old was either lying to save his own tush or lying to save his puppy (which he loved dearly and still does to this day). Either way it was pretty stinkin’ cute at the time. I asked “Zander, if you didn’t do it, and Lucy didn’t do it, how did pee get on the floor?” and his reply “I don’t know mommy. Maybe Hunter peed!” He said this completely straight faced! I couldn’t contain myself. I laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes! He’d saved himself and his puppy from blame and tried to throw his big brother under the bus!

To this day, I still don’t know whose pee I cleaned up off the floor that day. And Zander (now age 4) still lives by the motto “Save the Dog. Sacrifice the brother!”