Overconfidence

I had become blasé. There had been no toilet-training accidents since Sunday, so I took Toby to the park this morning, without a change of clothes.

I sat on the railings that run round the sandpit, absorbing the November sunshine, boasting to a friend about how great the toilet-train-your-child-in-seven-days method is.

“So what’s he wearing?” She asked.

“Just normal pants,” I said. She looked impressed, I think. “Today is the test, if we get through the morning, with all the toys and distractions here, then the method will have been a success.”

At half-past eleven, Toby had still not asked to go to the toilet. I cracked and asked, “Do you need to use the toilet?” This is against the advice of the book which emphasizes the importance of letting the child take responsibility and tell you when he needs to go, but how big is a toddler’s bladder? How slowly do toddler kidneys operate? “He must be near capacity,” I reasoned.

“No, no toilet,” said Toby, darting off into the sandpit to wrestle a plastic boat out of the hands of another child. I watched helpless as a pool of urine spread out around Toby’s right foot. The child with the boat pointed and dropped the boat into the puddle.

“Peer-group pressure, sure to be a good thing,” I thought as I walked over to Toby.

“Oh look, you did need the toilet,” I said in the calm matter-of-fact manner advised by the book, stifling my inner harridan behind a forced smile. “Let’s go home and get some dry clothes.”

“No, bye, bye home,” said Toby, running off, grains of sand clinging to his wet trousers. The book does not address the case in which a child does not mind hanging out in wet clothes, so I took matters into my own hands; I removed the wet trousers and hung them over the railing to dry in the sun, leaving Toby to play in his wet Thomas the Tank Engine pants. I thought about kicking some dry sand over the wet patch, but I was wearing my orange, damp-phobic shoes, so decided against it.

“What’s a bit more piss,” I thought. "Cats pee in the sandpit all the time and still these mothers dump their kids down to play in it."