The Internal Struggle Of A Six-Year-Old Boy, As Depicted By A Charity-Shop Triceratops

Tags

children, food, funny, Humor, kids, musings, Parenting, toilet

I saw this in a charity shop the other day whilst out brunching* with my daughter:

 

 

Every boy loves dinosaurs, don’t they? The scariness of them, the viciousness, the simplicity of their existence (eat, sleep, reproduce, terrorise Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas-Howard). Show me a young boy without a dinosaur in his collection and I’ll eat my hat.

 

 

What immediately struck me that this toy dinosaur though – aside from the cheap price and bizarre pale make-up of its face – was that it perfectly encapsulates an all-too-common occurrence in our household.

 

 

Note the crossed legs – I don’t believe any toy dinosaur ever represented, so accurately, the internal struggle between my six-year-old boy’s need to go for a wee and his desire to play just one more level on Super Mario 3D World.

 

 

Has anyone in the history of parenting ever asked their child if they needed a wee, and actually gotten the response ‘yes’?

 

 

Every time I ask my dancing, jiggling, shuffling, legs-crossed son if he needs a wee he says, emphatically, ‘no’. He then stops dancing, jiggling and shuffling, and un-crosses his legs.

 

 

For at least ten seconds.

 

 

It seems to me that, right up until their bladder is fit to explode, six-year-old boys NEVER need to wee.

 

 

Then they do and it sounds like someone’s pointed a jet-wash at my toilet and pressed the trigger. Oh to have a young prostate again….

 

 

I must say he is dedicated to his gaming/crafts/whatever else he may be doing while he so clearly needs the toilet. I have timed him doing his little ‘I don’t need a wee. oh yes I do’ dances for up to 30 minutes.

 

 

That must be excruciatingly painful, or maybe at 6 we don’t yet have the receptors ‘down there’ that make these matters that urgent.

 

 

I was once stuck on a train, with no toilet facilities, in London for 2o minutes, with a full bladder. At the end of those twenty minutes I would have happily given all my worldly possessions for a toilet to empty my bladder. Or even a dark alley. Hell, an empty bottle of Evian would have been a godsend.

 

 

So how he can do it for such long periods of time is beyond me.

 

 

Maybe it’s the dancing, jiggling, shuffling and crossing of the legs…maybe that’s the trick to prolong the pain. I will try that next week when I feel the urge.

 

 

Not sure my co-workers will approve though…

 

 

Oh, he also tends to grab his crotch, towards the end of his dance, like this man used to:

 

 

Now I know my co-workers really won’t like that…

 

 

I’m going to do it anyway.

 

 

*Brunching, for the uninitiated, is a meal eaten at around 11-a.m and is between breakfast and lunch – hence, ‘brunch’. It sounds posh but it’s really just me and my daughter eating sausages, beans and toast. Well, I do most of the eating, she tends to wreck the place.