it’s friday. thankyoudearlord.

this week’s been a doozy. a solo parenting, hotter than hell (with no a/c), massive amounts of urine, maggot sighting, teething, whining, thunderstorming, joyous week.

my son is in full on potty training mode. my dog is on prednisone. this means i might as well keep rubber gloves and lysol strapped to my hip for the next, oh, couple months. now i understand why jojo has  rubber shoe mats under her potties. when a little boy leans in to look at the pee coming out, his pee mechanism rotates up and his pee stream over.

and although i want to gasp, shriek and push that little pee mechanism down into the potty, i can’t. it’s taken so long to get to this point. a little “scoot back, honey!” is about as much as i can do to encourage, suggest but not distract. i clap, sing, hoot and holler and watch my tiles being engulfed by a yellow lake of pride.

but he’s doing it. like a lot. and he’s so proud of himself. and i am too. sticker chart, you meant well but we had to call in the big guns. hello, peanut m&m’s. now don’t get all, candy? oh my god. that’s, like, so not good. if my kid pees on the potty i give him a piece of kashi heart to heart. or a flax seed.

yeah, i appreciate healthy options. and i practice them. but the magic of one tiny m&m has won me over. and honestly, i’m a sucker for any candy. and as it turns out they are justin’s favorite – no wonder the bag is looking sheepishly deflated tonight.

and prednisone makes bayla thirstier than a camel in heat (um, i have no idea what that means, but it sounded fitting somehow) so she drinks a lot. and subsequently, pees a lot. so far i’ve missed the cue twice. once i didn’t know it was missed until i tread across a swampy, spongy section of the family room rug. it took a minute for my mind to rattle through the list of possibilities: improperly threaded sippy cup cover, over watered plant, leaky diaper, leaky roof…oh shit. leaking dog. uggghhhh.

and then later that night as i attempted to get the hell out of the house to meet a girlfriend for dinner, standing in the basement coaching our sitter on toddler bedtime routines and practically yelling to be heard over harper’s blood curtling screams upstairs ( overtired, over heated and sleeping in a pack n play in the play room because it’s the coolest spot in the house), the ceiling started leaking. and again, although only hours later, my mind goes through another list of possibilities: is it raining? busted pipe? is someone in the shower/bathtub? oh mother effer. that would be my dog’s pee falling like a waterfall through the slats in our wood floor. you’ve got to be kidding me.

oh, and in case you’re wondering, i found a family (or continent) of maggots living in the bottom of our trashcan. i know. i opted to leave it curbside  for two days because i was so utterly disgusted. but, much to my dismay, the maggot-cleaning fairy never came. tonight i dragged out the hose, filled it a few inches and dumped it down the street drainage thingy. i can’t really talk about it because i start to get all itchy and feel the urge to shower and scrub, with bleach. could be, hands down, the grossest thing i’ve ever encountered. moving along…

there were indeed some wonderful things about this week. and this is what we’ll focus on. besides, my children tend to be much more photogenic than the maggots.

we spent a fantastic hour on monday afternoon at the fish family farm. jackson decided he was terrified of the cows and didn’t turn his back on the barn even after settling into a perfect picnic spot (hundreds of feet away) with a perfect cup of mint chocolate chip. alas, while he spent all his energy on cow patrol harper and i reaped the benefits.

and on a day that actually reached 100 degrees (someone said connecticut had the hottest temps in the country?) we busted out the flailing-armed-caterpillar sprinkler. and everything got a little brighter, and a lot cooler.

goodbye week. goodnight friday. farewell little fly spawn which, by now, have hopefully made their way to the mouth of the connecticut.