Let's face it, boys love potty humor. I don't get it, but I sure have experienced it enough to know that it is a fact and I must just accept it.
My boys are no exception to this rule. Indeed, Trevor recently typed in a search for poop games - with no trouble spelling and no side jaunts to mother-of-the-bride-dresses. He ended up revelling in and sharing with his cousins a game, called Poop Machine, where a giant mouth consumes various items and, after travelling the intestines, ends up in a final product in the toilet. My all time favorite was the fruitcake which took forever in the intestines and, next Christmas, finally passed.
Last night, my husband settled in for the evening reading. One of the boys had picked out one of Bryce's old books: The Captain Underpants Extra-Crunchy Book O' Fun by Dav Pilkey. Let me tell you, Mr. Pilkey knows his audience! I mean, what boy wouldn't want to check out a book with the word "underpants" in the title.
By the end of their session, reading a small short story within the book called, "Hairy Potty and the Underwear of Justice," they actually felt a need to call their older brother out of his room to share in the revelry. In the story, a scientist is trying to create a formula for hair growth. When his attempts don't pan out as well as he'd hoped, he dumps the concoction down the toilet, but like every boy - in my house, anyway - he forgot to flush! The toilet grows hair and becomes "Hairy Potty," a gigantic, evil, hairy toilet.
It was the mischief this evil toilet causes which led to numerous requests for repetitious reading and endless little boy laughter. The toilet goes on a rampage zapping signs in the neighborhood. The first sign, which reads "At Bob's Diner, You'll Find That We Pick the Best Ingredients. Your Nose Knows the Diffrense! (sic)" becomes "At Bob's Diner, We Pick Your Nose." Oh, the laughter that erupted in my home.
Their favorite sign damage of all came at the end of the story. Captain Underpants has thrown the evil potty off the top of a building. As it falls it crashes through a sign for "Billy's Bread Co.: My Homemade Buttermilk Bread Smells Great! It's Awfully Good." The sign, now torn in half, reads "My Butt Smells Awful" and Sean begged for Daddy to read it over and over and over again.
This morning, not ten minutes out of bed, it started again, with the boys regaling each other with the exploits of the evil potty. They laughed so hard, I thought they might need to use the potty themselves.
Now, I'm sure there are parents out there who steer their sons away from such degraded humor. They might argue that it doesn't encourage upstanding behavior. But, I just can't bring myself to join their camp. Boys are cut from a different cloth than girls. Boys bond from this shared laughter the way girls often bond in shopping.
One day, when Trevor and I were pondering the imponderables of life, we stumbled upon the question of the ages: Why did God even bother to make our bodies toot and poop and vomit? Couldn't there have been a more sanitized manner of dealing with digestion? I suppose at the time, I ventured some sort of explanation about how even the good things in our life sometimes bring us results which are less than pleasant in their aftermath. I don't really remember what I said in reply. But, now I'm thinking of at least one reason why the potty parts of life may have been included in the grand scheme of things.
After all, they say "laughter is the best medicine." Indeed, even the Bible proclaims this wisdom in Proverbs 17:22 - "A joyful heart is good medicine" and Ecclesiastes 3:4 declares there is "A time to weep, and a time to laugh..."
These moments are beautiful to me, watching my husband and sons bowled over with laughter. Hearing their little voices repeating jokes from a book and laughing all day with delight over some bathroom humor doesn't put me off. Indeed, it fills my heart with joy. They are only boys after all, and boys can't help but find things like butts and toots and smells highly amusing. For me, I just find the boys themselves highly amusing and I'm glad for their laughter. It has, indeed, been good medicine today, even if it originated in the bathroom.
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