We haven't touched a diaper for a couple months around here, and we have the Japanese to thank for it. In the chance that anyone out there is still struggling with potty training, I might suggest a steady diet of bing cherries and a cappella in-bathroom renditions of the songs from this video:



And just in case your kid is confused by squatter toilets in public restrooms, this video should help:



I know these videos made the rounds long ago, but many of the links I've seen have been of the insulting "those wacky Japs!" variety. Personally, I don't think they're that out there. I think they are just more helpful, honest stuff from the far more civilized culture that brought us Everybody Poops. Has anyone else found these videos useful in potty training their non-Japanese speaking kids?

It turns out that a huge part of successfully potty training Juniper was not using a system of rewards, but cultivating a sense of mystique and ritual around the excretory functions themselves in the context of the bathroom. Long before she was ready, a friend of ours let Juniper watch her kid use the potty and then put on big girl pants. Ever since, Juniper has considered the porcelain shrine in our bathroom the site of an important rite of passage after which you get to wear special underwear (so, not unlike the Mormon temple). The Japanese potty training videos have been an integral part of further cultivating this mystique. She doesn't understand a word of what those crazy-ass tigers say, but that never stopped her from being mesmerized, and---as with any religious-experience worth its salt---a bit terrified by it all. Every time the live-action chubby kid at the end of the first video gets up on the pot and starts his grunting, Juniper shakes her head "No" and jumps off my lap and runs out the door of my office to watch the end of the video from the doorway. "No, no, Juney don't like that part," she says, but then asks to watch it all again. Luckily, there are plenty more Japanese toilet training videos, these ones starring a heroic hippopotamus named Pantsu Pankuro:



If only we'd had that constipation song six months ago., we never would have needed all that Miralax. Consider also the zen-like disposition of the anthropomorphized toilet, Toire-sama, a true sensei of the shitter. Note his wise resolution of Pankuro-kun's dilemma here:



I just don't know if I could pee with him looking at me like that. It would way be worse than those bathrooms with the mirror right above the toilet. The Buddha-like squatter toilet, too, seems to give excellent spiritual advice, and you don't have to look him in the eyes:



Squatter-san does seem to enjoy the flushing a little too much, though, if you ask me:



This last set includes the all-important "it's no big deal when you piss your bed" song for those mornings right after the nighttime diaper becomes history:



For months, Juniper has instituted a moratorium on scatological humor in our household. I am no longer allowed to laugh when she farts. She loves these videos, but she is deadly serious about them. She is constantly on guard for even the faintest hint of a smile on my face when we watch them together. "Dada, don't laugh! It's ridiculous!" She said the other day to my astonishment. How do you then not laugh at a toddler trying to pronounce ridiculous (At least she didn't say ridicurous).

"You are right Juniper-chan," I say, emulating the wise old toilet. "Pooping is a very serious matter. Even when it involves singing toilet paper dispensers. And jazz hands."

It used to kind of annoy me when people would tell me that their pets were their children. I would be wrangling the baby at a barbecue and get introduced to someone who would show me a picture of "their baby"--- a boxer or a basset hound --- and I always wanted to say, "The only way that gets to count as your baby is if I can put my daughter in a crate for eight hours with a bowl of kibble while my wife and I spend the evening getting wasted at the Arcade Fire show."

I get uncomfortable encountering women pushing pugs in $800 strollers. It also used to bother me when couples would tell me they were getting a dog as "practice" for raising a kid.

But now that I am a dog owner, I have greater sympathy for those who have agreed to share their homes with a canine. In some ways, having a dog isn't that different from having a baby. Consider shit. After Juniper was born, it felt like I was wrist deep in feces about half of the time. Shit was no longer something that easily slipped away up through the plumbing after a simple flush: suddenly it was something that oozed and leaked; it lurked in tightly-packed bundles at the bottom of the diaper decor; it hid behind the mysterious crags and folds of infant genitalia; it came in colors I had never seen, in consistencies that seemed to defy conventional earthly viscosities. It was, in a word, every-fucking-where.

Now that I have a dog, I can see that it is good way to acclimate oneself to loads of crap. Wendell, our dog, is a real shitter. He craps every time we take him for a walk, and that's four or five times a day. He has, on occasion, even pooped on our parquet floors. I have to say that having a lil' crapper was really good practice for having a dog. I haven't gagged or retched once now that I have experienced the plight of the urban dog owner: bending over and picking up the steaming pile of poo that has just oozed out of a dog's anus. It's not just humiliating, it's humbling in the same sort of way that parenthood can be. This is the cost of taking on the responsibility of something that doesn't know any better. Sometimes you just end up with a little bit of turd on your index finger.

When I was a kid, the word "fart" was on the same list as all those other words I wasn't allowed to say around my parents. No one in my house was allowed to use the word fart, and rather than fully exploring the wonderful euphemistic possibilities for this wholly-natural act, my family generally refrained from doing it in each other's presence altogether. Occasionally one of us would be blamed for "breaking wind," but it was more likely that one of us (or the dog) would be shamed for making a "toot." If you think "toot" sounds lame, consider it as a verb in the present perfect aspect: "Dutch has tooted." Now that's downright embarrassing. A fat kid in my Sunday School class who loved to talk to me about 18-wheelers was quite proud of his "rippers," and my 8-year-old self frequently giggled through the jealousy that he could speak of them with such pride. The black kids at my school called them "poots," which was way better than "toots." My classmates also used the wonderful phrase, "dropping bombs," as in, "damn son, you dropped a bomb!" They could have been "bombs," or "zingers," "brown thunder" or "air bagels." Anything but "toots." I vowed at an early age to never restrict the verbiage my children would use to describe their flatulence.

This early vow has turned into something of a mistake.

Juniper is obsessed with farts, her own and everyone else's. She has taken it upon herself to play the role of fart referee. As lawyers, we are accustomed to presenting evidence to a neutral arbiter. Juniper has no time for evidence or neutrality. When it comes to farts, what she says goes. The scooting leg of a chair? "Dada farted!" A poofy naugahyde seat? "Mama farted!" In mixed company, holding Juniper in my arm, I feel an air bubble travel through her diaper and pants, breaking against my forearm? "Minnie farted! A real big fart! Smells like poopoo!" Even worse, Wood's parents are much less self-conscious than my own when it comes to expelling their gas. Wood was raised to believe that "holding them in" caused "green gases" to back up and affect her brain. Thus, Wood's mother bears no compunction to let one rip under almost any circumstance. Over the weekend, this happened several times.

The bottom line: this weekend we learned we need to find a happy medium between, "Grandma has tooted!" and "Nana made big fart! It's a stinky one, too, I think!"