Emma is 3 now, which means two things:
- She is taking after her Aunt Linda and becoming abnormally articulate for her age
- She is (knock on wood) pretty much fully potty trained

So, when she needs to go potty now, she can basically do the whole thing by herself, although she does still announce the whole proceeding by shouting "I NEED TO GO POTTY!!!" at the top of her considerable lung capacity as she dashes headlong across the house towards her bathroom. For my part, however, having so recently been indispensible to the process, I still can't help poking my head in on her from time to time, to see how everything is going. Last night during one of these "check ins", she looked up at me and said, "Rrrr!" so of course I said "Rrrr!" back. To which she replied, "No, MMMMM! Das a yummy sound. Mmmm. Mmmm." I said, "Ah, mmmm. I see," and thus encouraged she went on: "Uuuhn! Das' a poop sound. Uuuuhn! Uuuuhn! Ooohn! Ooohn!" and thus were the next few minutes enjoyably passed. Ian, unfortunate enough to walk past during the concerto, was overheard to pose the question, "What is going ON in there??"

Finally finishing, she climbed down, allowed Daddy to do the wiping for old times' sake, and turned to admire her handiwork. By way of preface, please know we've been doing colors lately: blue and red mixed together, you get purple; red and yellow mixed together, you get orange; etc. So, there is Emma, gazing proudly into the potty and summarizing her recent accomplishments: "Look Daddy! I made poo AND pee! Mixed! Poo and pee mixed! (A thoughtful pause.) What do you get when you mix poo and pee?" Now, this was not the first time that Emma had inquired about the result of mixing, shall we say, "non complementary colors". For example, she likes to ask about pink and anything: pink and yellow, pink and blue, pink and green. We usually just say "brown?" but poo is already brown, so that clearly wouldn't do.

One of my favorite stalling tactics when taken aback by my daughter is to simply repeat the question. "Hmm, what do you get when you mix poo and pee together? Umm, sewage?"

The answer satisfied her and she dismissed her output with a flush. However, I hope Michelle reads this soon so she'll know what's going on and be ready the next time Emma asks her for a "sewage" colored crayon.


© Robert Nickel 2009