The Potty Sings a Ditty

Oh hi, potty training. Wasn't expecting to see you here yet at 22 months. Yet there's the boy with naked butt clamoring about the house, his every move studied from my hawkish perch on the couch, waiting for the telltale pause, the hands moving downward.

DO YOU NEED TO PEE IN THE POTTY, JULIAN?

I gently nudge (/shove) his little back towards the bathroom, towards the mini green potty with a blue crown on the top that sings to you when you tinkle on it. Or take a dump on it. Amazingly, he starts to get it. I find myself dumbfounded at a stream of urine going into the toilet because this little, little person who cannot yet make a sentence can understand what I want him to do and do it. He starts to say 'potty?' on his own and trot to the bathroom to make the potty sing without my supervision. Today is Monday, day four of toilet training, and he took his own naked behind to the potty today to do his business, no help needed.

Really cool. But also - what. happened. to. my. baby.



Wasn't planning on training him this early. The plan was to wait until he wanted to do it himself, like all the mommy blogs say to do. BUT. A hard deadline has been introduced, and Lord willing, it will fall somewhere around February 5, 2014.

A wee babe.

In God's mercy, neither Hodgkins nor its poisonous cure nor biology's unpredictable whimsy has denied my body the miracle of hosting a human.

I recognized with veteran precision the symptoms I denied in 2011 for nearly two months: the lead eyelids and bowling ball head, desperate to land horizontal for sleep; nausea yet a mighty hunger; the Dolly Parton sisters swelling under my chin. I crawled through the afternoons, dizzy for my bed, willing my fingers to finish my work, drive me home, lift my little one up for dinner and into the bath and into bed. I pried open the doors of Whole Foods at 8am for the bacon, darted from work at lunch for the whole tray of vegetable sushi, and inhaled all of the chocolate covered almonds for dinner. Each meal is a new craving, and it is well that I work if only to cover my food bill. I didn't need a staring contest with the EPT for this one. In fact, I never took one.

I can't imagine what another child will be like. It will be all me and Sam, yet completely separate. It will share the same pool of DNA as Julian but may be as different from him as I am from my introverted artist of a younger brother, or my extroverted people-manager of a youngest brother. I have no frame of reference for what having a girl would be like, though I quietly hope I have the chance to find out. A boy I can picture holding close and small, and Julian would have the brother he would enjoy.



And again with the obsessive pregnancy fears: the frozen stare at every cramp and tightness in my middle, the hope and hope and hope at every hour that the wee blob of cells will stay put, that my body won't betray this little one. What kind of God is God who would allow a woman to miscarry? But what kind of God is God who commands me and my husband to create with Him someone new - rather than simply forming people from mud, as He did in the beginning? I cannot begin to grasp Him.

I was scheduled for a 6 month Hodgkins followup scan in July which is delayed due to the pregnancy. Even the preventive treatment for cancer can be lethal. In the back of my mind, and only there really, I hope that the hormone-fest of the next 6ish months will not reawaken any lurking cancer cells. But that is not really my domain, and I practice trusting it to Him whose it is.