Take one silly, teething baby ...

Add one dollhouse potty WITH ATTACHED BOWL BRUSH ...















Laugh heartily. (At least it's not a real toilet brush):

I walk into the family room, where there are people wearing what looks like 18th-century garb on my television set and a deeply portentous narrator's voice filling my entertainment space. Great. Educational crap.

Me, exasperated: What are we watching?
Him: "Nova"!
Me, amused: I'm sorry, "Nova"? With dramatization? Since when does your beloved "Nova" offer dramatization?

Minutes go by, although let's face it, it could have been just seconds ...

Me: Why are we still watching this? I'm in no mood to learn anything. Can you turn on "Greek" instead?
Him: But this is really exciting stuff. It's leading up to how they figured out E= mc2!
Me: What is that anyway?
Him: It's like the greatest equation of all time!
Me: Yeah, but what is it?
Him: It's the key to ...
Me: No, what does it stand for?
Him: Energy equals Mass times the Speed of Light squared.
Me: But that doesn't make any sense.
Him: I know! That's what is so incredible about it. Think about it: energy, mass and speed of light in the same equation!
Me: No, I mean that "C" would stand for "speed of light." That doesn't make sense.
Him: No, but: Energy is related to mass times the speed of light squared! It's amazing. Doesn't that just blow your mind?
Me: What blows my mind is that they decided that "C" stood for the "speed of light," when there is clearly no C in the phrase. And also, that we're watching this instead of "Greek."

As previously mentioned on this blog, the biggest little person in our house has a problem with the pronouns. So, "he's" are "she's" and "she's" are "he's" and "I" or "me" is almost always third-person "MJ." (Although, she has a very fun ongoing joke right now in which if you tell her she's a silly goose or a funny bunny or what have you, she smiles and responds with great glee, "No, I'm not! I'm MJ!" Which I love. They really ought to bottle the cuteness.)

She's sort of like Stephen Colbert, except instead of not seeing race and color, she doesn't see gender.

Anyway, because of her pronoun confusion, she's come up with a new twist on an old favorite song. This is how she sings it:

Twinkle twinkle, little star
How you wonder what you are
Up above the clouds so high
Like a diamond in the sky
Twinkle twinkle little star
How you wonder what you are

... every single time.

A twinkle twinkle star with an identity problem. Preschool really is advanced these days.

While I was at the gym early this morning, Randy was awakened by an MJ who was completely soaked from the waist down. "I peed, Daddy," she told him -- which is really the way you want to start your day: being notified of preschooler potty activities gone awry. And then she handed him one of her clean shirts and a clean pair of underwear. Which is resourceful if not entirely correct.

The mystery was: Where was the rest of the pee? Her bed was dry, so that wasn't the scene of the crime. No carpet puddles were discovered in the upstairs jurisdiction. Hmmm...

So, when I got home shortly after "the incident," I asked her , "MJ, where were you when you went?"

"Nothing," she said, which has become her go-to answer for every question. (Which I kind of love, if it weren't so obviously incriminating.) And then she said, "In there," pointing to the bathroom next to the laundry room, into which I had just walked to get a clothes basket. And then I heard a splash.

"If you peed in the bathroom," I asked, staring down at my bare feet, "what am I standing in right now?"

As it turns out, the puddle extended across two rooms, from the one in which she had just missed making it to the potty in time, to the one where she opened up the dryer to get that clean shirt and undies out for Randy to change her.

At least she knows her way around a laundry room. This gives me hope that she'll be able to take care of herself when she's an adult ... well, if she can find the bathroom in time.

My poor peanut had a rough day at preschool last Thursday. It was rainy and yucky, and that just about summed up her mood, too. They were having a "Fancy Nancy" ice cream party that Little L and I went in to help set up for. At the appointed time, MJ shuffled in with her class with her fancy bead necklace and sparkly crown that she had made the day I was in the classroom as the "teacher's assistant" (there's a job description I didn't prepare for in college), looking so glum I wanted to promise her ice cream every day for a year.

So they all sat down in front of little name cards they had also made, and she looked up at Little L and I standing nearby and tried to muster a smile, weak though it was. She ate her ice cream, keeping her head down pretty much the whole time, until the entertainment portion of the morning began.

Apparently in the book Fancy Nancy, which they had been reading all week at school, a waiter drops a tray full of ice cream. So the preschool folks had one of the dads carry a tray full of empty Styrofoam bowls between the tables where the kids sat, and then pretend to trip and drop the tray.

But he really did fall, a la Jack Tripper in "Three's Company," and made a pretty good crashing sound for a fake tumble. The tray clambored to the ground, the bowls went flying ... and the kids, most of them, weren't quite sure what to make of it. A few laughed, but mostly they were quietly unnerved by it. I mean, after all, here's someone who could have been their own daddy, falling to the ground with a great commotion. Even I was a little worried, and I was in on the joke. Surely someone would cry. Surely, someone would wonder about the safety of the daddy/fake waiter.

And sure enough, above the confusion came one colossal cry and accompanying bucket of tears. From my MJ. And what did she say, when she stopped heaving long enough to say something? Did she express concern for the poor guy who took the fall, you might ask?

Not exactly.

"Oh no!" she wailed, "The ice cream! The ice cream is all gone! What are we going to do?"

Oh, MJ.

To be fair, though, she's not totally about the desserts. At the end of the day, the teacher asked each of the kids what they're favorite part of the day had been. She wrote each of their responses next to their names on a poster and taped it to the wall in the hallway where we parent types were waiting to pick up our small ones. MJ's answer? "Ice cream and Mommy."

I'm sure she didn't mean it in that order.