Mothers of little boys work from son up until son down

I have a cute little plaque on my desk with that saying on it. It makes me smile when I think about it. Raising boys can be a roller coaster ride ~ not that raising girls wouldn’t be, it would just be a different kind of roller coaster ride.

Tonight was a perfect example of the difference in raising girls and raising boys. We were walking out to the field for baseball tonight. Ethan was a good ways ahead of us on the long path to get to the field. I could see what looked like a large puddley, muddy area ahead of us where someone had driven a truck or tractor across the path. what happened next may shock you, and I want to first say that we were still pretty far off from where the people and the field were so this was not as “public” as it could have been.

Ethan stops, looks over his shoulder and says, “hey a big puddle!”

I think to myself that he’s going to jump in the puddle. I start to say something about jumping in puddles to my husband who is walking next to me…

I stop speaking, stop walking, stop breathing momentarily….

My darling youngest son has stopped in front of the puddle, not to get the proper angle to jump into it, not to go around it, not to go tromping through it. No, he does none of these things. Can you guess what my normally adorable child does?

He PEES in it!

I think my heart may have stopped for a brief moment. He’s never been shy about going pee before. He’s peed on the side of the road before when traveling and the next rest stop isn’t for another 30 miles or so. He’s peed in the woods when there’s no toilet to be found within walking distance. But this was just right there, out in the open, people were not that far away, and if anyone was looking up the path they would have seen him and wondered “is that little boy taking a leak?” but unless they had super vision they probably wouldn’t have been able to tell for sure.

Scolding him for this was difficult, and I’ll admit that I did not scold him harshly for it. Afterall, people pee. I just very firmly explained that puddles are not for peeing in, and reminded him that if he walked to the end of the path and around the small building there was a port-a-potty (or as he calls it an outhouse!) although ~ the puddle was probably more sanitary than the port-a-potty!!! We carry a large bottle of Purell for all the kids on the team to use, and quite a few times I’ve seen one of the boys on the team open the port-a-potty door, close it, and go running into the woods! The girls on the team aren’t so fortunate as to be able to choose the woods over the port-a-potty.

That was my exciting day. Good thing I wasn’t taking pictures for the boring day carnival today. Whew. Maybe tomorrow I’ll take my boring day pictures.

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