No, Honey, You Have to Stand Up When You Do That

I was raised in a household of women. I mention this only because men in many ways are a mystery to me, as I am sure women are for most men.

My lack of understanding came out yesterday when I was outside working on our raised beds, replanting some of the seed that the flooding rains washed away. Kitt looked at me and said, “Mommy, I have to pee.” Wondering when children stop telling their parents this, and then realizing that I still say the same thing to my coworkers, I nodded and told her to come back out when she was done.

She then began to pull down her pants in the middle of the backyard.

“What are you doing?!?” I screamed out at her, incredulous.

“Well, I want to pee in the grass.”

“Honey, there’s a perfectly good bathroom in the house. Please make use of it.”

“But I WANT TO PEE IN THE GRASS!”

“NO. INSIDE.”

She ran off towards the inside. A few minutes later she came jogging back towards me smiling.

“Did you go inside?”

“No. I went in the front.”

“Ugh, why did you do that? I told you to go inside.”

“Daddy taught me how.”

Of course he did. My first thought was of the DHS worker who was going to knock on my door because I obviously was not taking care of my 3 1/2-year-old daughter, my second was the memory of Xandy relating to me how he showed her how to pee in the barn.

“You know that she is not a boy right. She just can’t stand up and pee.” I had said to him at the time.

“She’s fine. She likes it!” He told me. I think I told him that no girl likes peeing all over herself because she is standing up straight, and he nodded and walked off like he usually does.

Now, a couple of years later, as I sat rocking on the front porch with my sister-in-law (whose idea it was for this post), I noticed that Kitt had pulled her pants down and was sitting in the grass on a hill in the front yard.

“What is she doing?” I asked my husband as he walked toward me.

“Peeing.”

“But she is sitting down in the grass!”

“Yeah well, she was having a tough time standing up so I told her to sit down.”

“HoNEY, that is NOT how girls pee outside. Seriously. She has to lean.”

He answered with a nod and a “It’s a work in progress.”

It sure is.