It’s been a month since I looked forward to bedtime.
Usually this time, 8 p.m. sharp, is a brilliant shining light in the long stretch of a boy-filled day, because it’s the time I finally get to hide away in my room and ignore those non-emergency cries and hang out with my husband or read or just go to bed myself.
But we’ve been potty training twins, and now they’re in a room they can escape from, because how can you successfully potty train a 2-year-old without giving them access to the potty at night?
Bedtime has now become drive-Mama-crazy time.
Because now it’s not just the cries of older boys that come knocking on our door (“I need some pajamas” from the just-turned-8-year-old, who still hasn’t put away last week’s laundry, so his pajamas are buried beneath all those Star Wars books scattered all over his room; a “Where’s my blanket?” from the 5-year-old, because earlier today someone carried it downstairs and decided it was too much work to bring it back up; an “I don’t have a pillow” from the 4-year-old who doesn’t look very well, because there’s a pillow right beside his face).
Now the (maybe emergency? maybe not?) cries of twins have joined the cacophony.
“I need go poo poo in the potty bad, Mama,” they say. (Do they? I just don’t know.)
“I pee pee in my underwear, Daddy,” they say. (We check. It seems to be a threat of some kind.)
“I poo poo. Ew!” (This one brings a mama and daddy running, but it also seems to be an empty threat—at least until the day we decide to ignore it.)
Potty training is challenging, because it’s so dang hard to know when they’re telling the truth or just stalling bedtime.
So, for a while, every time one of those calls came, we let them out of bed to go potty.
Here’s what would happen 99 percent of time.
One twin: “I need go poo poo really bad, Mama.”
Other twin: “Me too.”
Mama: “OK. One at a time.”
I take one twin out of the room to go potty, and on the way there he finds a stuffed frog he didn’t even know he was missing until he saw it, so he picks it up. Then he sees a book he wants to put back on the library shelf and a toy that shouldn’t even be upstairs and a piece of paper he wants to throw in the trash when he (finally, if ever) makes it to the bathroom.
Mama: “Looks like you didn’t have to go so badly after all.”
Twin, shaking his head. “I go bad, Mama.”
Mama: “Then let’s go to the bathroom.”
Twin: “OK.”
Once on the potty, he’ll strain for a few seconds, just to put on a show, and then a little pee trickles out, probably so I can’t say he didn’t have to go, because look, he did, and then he says, “Done.”
Repeat with twin 2.
We caught on to their little game.
So lately, when those cries start coming, we give them one more potty escapade, whatever it may look like, and then we tell them they need to hold it until morning, and we cross our fingers.
I’ve never been a big fan of transitions like these, because they can seem so difficult and never-ending when we’re right in the middle of them, but we’ve had three other boys who prove that someday, maybe weeks from now or maybe (God forbid) months from today, these twins will know and understand the rules, and bedtime will become the sweet time it was meant to be for all parents everywhere in the world.
Transition times will always, eventually, someday, smooth into normalcy.
One of these days, our twins will realize that their I-need-to-potty cries aren’t working anymore, because we just took them five minutes ago, and they couldn’t possibly need to go again already, but for now, they’ll play their game and keep us wondering and hoping and crossing fingers.
For now, I will dread bedtime because it’s no longer rest time.
For now, I will sit in the library recliner instead of lying in my comfy bed, reading in between those reminders for twins to stay in their beds, pacifying myself when I feel like crying that this will not last forever.
Thank God it will not last forever.
