CTKS part deux of the day

Playing cards with Number Two Nephew. We began with Go Fish, and segued to War.

Two explained to me that when he first heard of War (the game) his first thought was of lions and zebras in the wild; and to this day, that's still in his mind. Lions and zebras at war.

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Four is toilet training. Actually, to be quite accurate, he is potty training. Which means that we are all potty-obsessed, while he does everything he can to avoid it. All the same, the lure of gummy worms as rewards for a successful deposit does occasionally work to get him where he needs to be... on his potty... in the middle of the living room.

Whenever he makes certain noises, or strikes a certain posture, or gestures in a certain way to his diaper-covered regions, someone scrambles for his potty, chattering away to him, "do you have to go potty? Wait for the potty, ok? The potty's coming! Don't go in your diaper! Pee in the potty and you get a gummy!" Which sometimes works, and sometimes meets with outright refusal. Then he sits on his little blue potty, but he certainly is not chained in place: he scoots around the living room as if he were in an office chair - over to the windows to watch the cars go by; back to the table to see what his brother is playing with; to the couch to pick up his book, all with the blue potty attached to his hind end. He sits there so long that when he gets up, he has a red ring around his bottom, like a bullseye target. Too cute. (He'll so love me sharing these stories when he's 16!)

This past weekend, his family went on a road trip to Oma's, and the potty went with him. Now, when you're potty training, you have to be consistent, so when Four said he had to go pee, everything came to a halt, so that the potty could be employed. There he sat, in the middle of the parking lot of a tourist attraction dedicated to a very large autumnal fruit, in the van, on his potty with the doors wide open. An elderly foreign lady walked by, and in his three-year old broken English started to boss her about. I'd have loved to see that... Four in his glory: his throne on wheels.