Learning the States: 50 New Ways to Describe the Shape of your Poop

 It’s not all sports around here. If, after reading the headline, you’ve decided that this entry may contain more than your recommended daily allowance of information, please proceed to the next entry on our daughter’s art project.

Through the use of a game called Stack the States, our two older kids have learned most of the 50 states, their shapes and their locations. This is probably a good thing for them to have in their back pocket for future reference, but for now it serves mostly just as a bragging point when I call their grandparents.

The other unforeseen advantage was that it expanded the three-year-old’s descriptive repertoire for his bowel movements, which are depicted as regularly as they are deposited, which is every time we sit down for dinner, no matter when dinner is.  Even his regularity is irregular.

(This seems like a good place to remind new parents struggling with potty training that your work does not end when your child starts sitting on the can to do his business. There is the matter of cleanup, and after watching the care my guy took in putting away his train set and seeing sidewalk chalk and toy lawnmower parts strewn all over the yard, I am not comfortable he’s fastidious enough to ensure he won’t smell like a fresh turd for the next 12 hours.  Especially given our current sleeping arrangements. So when he interrupts our dinner with “I’m done! Somebody wipe my BUTT!! Poop looks like Florida!” I answer him every time. But I make him wait until I’m done eating.)

Gone now are the days when everything in the toilet is compared to a carrot, which surprisingly was frequently correct. Sometimes his geographic comparisons are spot on, other times it’s been a reach. When it looked like Delaware, it was cute and geometrically reasonable. When it looked like Florida, it was cute but way off. When it looked like Alaska, we dialed the on-call pediatrician immediately.

We haven’t yet had anything resemble Jesus or a weeping Virgin Mary, and so I’m wondering if that means we aren’t going to church enough. Stay tuned to the last five minutes of your late local news on that.