in which i try to pee alone

Today I get home and am in desperate need of the toilet, so I do an utterly audacious thing:  I walk into the bathroom and close the door. 

No sooner have I sat down, than both girls are at the door screaming as though they’ve been stabbed.  I should know better than to look… I mean, I *do* know better… but whenever my children are crying, some sort of absurdly over-developed primordial instinct takes over, and a surge of epinephrine prepares me  to fight with whatever predator may be devouring my offspring. 

I open the door, just a centimeter to check for wolves and lions and hawks and such, and my firstborn pounces in and declares mightily that she needs to pee right this very instant.  We take such declarations seriously, as her independence from diapers is yet in its incipience.  She sits down on her froggy potty, directly across from me.

So there we are, face to face, drawers on the floors, having just another run-of-the-mill, tender mother-daughter moment.  I look at my daughter and see four eyes (two human, two amphibian) looking back.

Her:  What are you doing?
Me:  I was thinking about peeing.  Sometimes I have to pee, and I just, I come in here thinking maybe I’ll have myself a bit of a pee.
Her:  I’m peeing, too.  Can you stop talking now?  I really need to pee, Mom.

Her face grimaces with concentration and soon a trickle is audible.  And then a hysterical Lily bursts in, screaming her hysterical I’m-about-to-succumb-to-natural-selection scream.  “I WANT MILKKKKKK!” she screams.  She hysterically climbs onto my lap and hysterically pulls down my shirt.

All while my firstborn and her toilet are staring at me from across the tile. 

Her:  I beated you.
Me:  What?
Her:  I peed faster than you.  I beated you.
Me:  Well, I was distracted because Lily came in. 
Her:  Mom, you didn’t pee fast.  I’m the pee champion.

This erudite conversation is interrupted by Lily hysterically screaming “NOOOOOOOO!”  Lily doesn’t like it when I talk while she’s nursing.  She will not have it.

And then Amelia again, with, “Mommy, how are you going to dump my pee into the toilet if you’re sitting on it?”

Her toilet has a removable body-waste receptacle, which I normally empty immediately after use.   “I’ll empty it after I pee, honey.”

But it is too late – she has stood up, receptacle in hands.  “Here, Mommy.”  Before I process what is happening, I am holding an open bowl of urine with one hand, a nursing toddler with the other, and my drawers are still all the way down on the floors. 

“Tiiiiiiimmmmmm!”

And then there we are, all four of us.  All hanging out in our shoe-box-sized bathroom together, just like every other time I try to pee.

And that stupid frog is just sitting there with a smirk on his face.