Urine Is Sterile, Right?

Last night, when I took Gabe up to bed, he crawled in and did his standard inventory of friends and sleeping accessories, finding his binky and blankie and flashlight and the old cell phone that he calls Poppa or Fireman Sam on and his half a dozen books and the dozen or so friends that he's decided he simply MUST have in bed at all times. After that, he looked at me and asked, "Can you empty the pee pee out of my potty?"

"Why?" I replied. "I just emptied it out before your nap today. Did you fill it up already?"

"No," he said, trying to sound innocent. "Can you empty my pee pee?" he repeated.

So I opened up the potty and peered in. "Oh, Gabe," I said as I inspected the inventory within.

I spied one of his binkies and a pepperoni from a Melissa and Doug play pizza set of his. And two white, porcelain balls that I couldn't immediately identify. They looked like handles from a dresser or small doorknobs or something.

"What is this stuff?" I queried. "And why are they in your potty?"

"That binky is broken," he answered by way of explanation. Clearly, when a binky has reached the end of its line, a heavy soaking of piss is what it needs before its send off to the landfill.

"What is this other stuff?" I continued. "Where did these white balls come from?"

"The curtains," he said, and I realized what they were. We installed curtain tieback bracket thingies (whatever they're called, I'm too lazy to look it up) on the walls so we could pull the curtains over and hold them there. Each of them had a little decorative ball screwed into them. He had unscrewed them, during his nap yesterday afternoon when I THOUGHT he was quietly sleeping. Then, for reasons that he was unable to elaborate on, he'd put them in his potty.

Needless to say, we had a discussion of the inappropriateness of storing household items in a potty full of pee. How he managed to nearly fill it in one nap time is another matter for consideration later on.

Sadly, when I brought the potty tray downstairs, I was a bit irate, so I didn't think to take a picture. It would have been a quite interesting tableau, perhaps even delving into the realm of art. Too bad I wasn't thinking more clearly.

I did, however, snap a picture of him this morning that was a bit amusing.

He wore this basket on his head for about fifteen minutes. When I asked him why, he said, "It's my fireman helmet." This is especially odd because the ACTUAL fireman helmet, the one from his Halloween costume, was lying on the floor in the dining room the entire time. He might have kept it on longer but he realized, after that fifteen minutes, that he wasn't wearing it so much as it was stuck on his head. A short, panicked (for him) scene followed this picture a few minutes later when he realized this fact and I had to pry it loose from his head.