Happy Father....???

Nov. 2006

I'm working at nights right now, so I usually sleep from about 9 in the morning to two or three in the afternoon...and I use the term 'sleep' in the most general of senses. Yesterday 'morning' (about 1 p.m.) I woke up to the sounds of the three year old in the bathroom. I congratulated myself on having such a competent kid, all going to the bathroom by himself and what, and rolled back over. Then I hear this, "I poo'd on the floor."
As you can imagine, this made me more than just a little curious. Leaping from the bed like a cat...perhaps a cat who has just recently been placed in a burlap sack and beaten senseless, I stumbled to the bathroom to find, you guessed it. Poo, right there on the floor where he said it was going to be.
I proceeded to interrogate the accused, asking questions like, "Kade, how did the poo get on the floor?" To which I would get answers like, "It came out of my bum."
This went on for about 10 minutes, like a watered-down Guantanamo QandA session. I would try to rephrase my questions so as to properly project my message, which was 'how did the poo get on the floor.' Alas, all I got from the three year old, who might I mention was not bothered in the least by the fact that there was a poo on the floor, was the obvious chain of events answer. 'It came out of my bum. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.'
"This kid is good," I thought to myself. So I gave up. I cleaned up the poo, with the assistance of my staff of highly trained home sanitation specialists (Cari). I've not had to deal with the problem again, though I doubt very much that this will be the last death match between our floor and some poo that I will ever referee.
As best as I can figure, I have two options as a father. The first would be to develop a bi-lateral parenting plan in which Cari and I would tackle the problem based on the strengths that both of us bring to the relationship. I would maybe play some fun imagination games about traveling through a poo jungle and not stepping on the dangerous poo-traps on the ground, which of course I would segue into a lesson about not putting dangerous poo-traps on the floor of the bathroom. Cari could use her mothering instict to express our love as parents but in no uncertain words let Kake know that if he ever poos on the floor again we will chain him in the basement for the rest of his childhood and adolescent years, and that he'd better hope that we either remember to throw food down the stairs every once in a while or that we suddenly develop an infestation of fat, slow, easy-to-catch rats that he can eat or he will starve to death down there.
The other option is to coat the entire house and everything we own in Teflon. I would install a drain in the lowest point in the house and just hose the entire place down once a week. I would probably even get one of those hose add-on things and put a little disinfectant in the mix. "Any job worth doing is worth doing well," I would tell myself.
I've been thinking about which one would be more effective, and based on the fact that I'd dealing with a three year old, and the accompanied threat of dealing with a rash of three year old's in the future, I'm currently looking for a good Teflon dealer. If anybody knows one, lemme know...