Hide & Pee is NOT an acceptable children's game

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My daughter loves playing hide and seek. She’s absolutely terrible at it, since she always likes to hide in the same spot – sometimes she even starts hiding before my eyes are closed.

She’s somewhat better at looking for me when we play, but when she does find me, she wants to hide where she just found me. Okay, she’ll get the point eventually.

But in the past two weeks she’s had three accidents while hiding. The first was in the closet while standing on the boot tray – which if you’re going to have an accident is a pretty good place to have one. After all, the tray is already there to hold melting snow, a little bit of pee isn’t a problem.

We’ve been reminding her that she has to go, she’s got to stop whatever she’s doing – and we’ll continue after she goes to the bathroom. Alas it doesn’t seem to be sinking in.

Last night MrsB asked the Hordling if she had to go before dinner, and she said no – then we asked her after dinner, and she said no again.

Then we played hide and seek, and the brat pissed in my bed. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE! She was all smiles when I ‘found’ her, telling me that she went pee – then she went white with terror as she was hauled out of bed and I stripped the sheets. I’m very glad I have a thick mattress cover which absorbed all the offending liquid, but goddamitohell it just ain’t right to have someone piss in your bed!

While I was getting the laundry started, MrsB washed the Hordling and put her to bed in a jiffy, even if it was an hour before bedtime. The wailing died off pretty quick when she realized how furious both her parents were.

<sigh> kids.

2

You should have had me as a kid. I used to ask permission if I could go to the bathroom. I distinctly remember the day I walked into the living room and asked mom if I could go to the bathroom and my mom and her guests all chuckling about how I was old enough to not have to ask first.

Hey, it’s news to me, you bitches!

3

Really? I’m just asking, because, you know, this one guys used to pay me…

4

What about Duck Duck Pee? Is that a good game?

5

I’ve played hide and seek with my nieces. No known problems with peeing–at least, no problems with peeing related to playing hide and seek. (Some problems with not wanting to pee when other, more interesting activities were available, but the older one’s mostly outgrown that, and the younger’s still in diapers).

But I’ll tell you a story about bad seeking skills–that probably won’t amuse you as much as they did me.

Over New Year’s, we were gathered together in the living room of my brother’s house. Uncle (my uncle–technically great uncle to the nieces) was playing Horsie. So was I. I had the little one (not yet 3) on my back, Uncle had the almost 5 year old on his back. I’ll call her Bossy. Bossy dismounts, and orders Horsie to stay put. Then she turned her back on him.

Uncle (Horsie) backs up slowly and quietly into a corner. He’s still visible to the adults in the room, but not to Bossy–because she’s not paying attention.

Bossy finishes whatever she’s doing, and turns around and can’t see Horsie. She runs off downstairs towards the kitchen, calling for Horsie. He of course, crouches silently in his corner.

Bossy comes running back, bypasses the living room, and charges upstairs hollaring for Horsie. By this time, the rest of the adults are near hysterical with laughter–especially when my other niece, who was still sitting on my back, called out to her sister where Horsie could be found.

Bossy came back, stalked up to Horsie, and demanded that he carry her around the room some more. He did.

A couple of days later, we played Horsie again. One of my nieces asked me to be a horsie like Uncle-- I assured her that I would play Horsie, but not like Uncle. On that occassion, Bossy ordered Uncle not to move–unlike the other day. She didn’t take her eyes off him for very long.

6

I like what I’m reading!

Barbarian, that sucks. They’re such a handful at 16.

7

You’ve seen by now that she is not yet willing to stop fun activities to use the toilet, so step it up a notch. Instead of just reminding her, actually tell her that you need her to sit on the potty (or whatever you call it) before the game can continue. If she says no she doesn’t have to go, just calmly pick her up and sit her on it. The problem is that she may not have the full bladder sensation at the exact moment you ask her, but with little bladders there’s not much time between not needing to go and needing to go NOW. By that time she’s so immersed in the fun game that she can’t pull herself away and nature takes its course. She’ll eventually grow out of it, but until then being a bit more proactive should help.

I know how frustrating this situation can be, but try to see it from her point of view. She really doesn’t deserve your fury.

8

Hey, it’s better than having a drunken room-mate pee in your closet. Twice.

9

What makes it really frustrating is that Barbarian’s daughter is fifteen years old.

(Yeah, I see a similar joke has already been made. How old is the daughter in question, actually?)

10

Himself and I have now been using “Hide and Go Pee” as a universal answer for “I dunno, what do you wanna do?” “Play Hide and Go Pee.”

11

Well, it’s better than Pee Pee Goose.

12

So many fun-loving couples, so little time.

13

Yeah, I think getting “furious” over something she can’t help seems counterproductive, and just the teeniest bit mean.

14

I was always a fan of Red Light Pee Light when I was a kid.

15

Even today, I still think that a good game of Pee Tag is a great diversion at parties.

16

Eh, parents have feelings, too. Sometimes, as I said in another thread recently, the “natural consequence” of doing something wrong is that you piss off Mama (or Papa) and they get “mean”. Going to bed an hour early won’t damage Princess.

But I think it might be time for a talk about diapers and if she wants to go back there, or maybe a sticker chart for no accident days with the notification that three accidents a week (or whatever) means diapers for the next week or something of that nature. Diapers are not a failing. Toilet training takes a while, and this is a huge part of why.

I also agree that you interrupting play time to have both of you use the toilet and then immediately going back to play is a great idea. She hears you say she can do that, but I wonder if she isn’t afraid that a break in play means you’ll lose interest in playing with her and go log onto the Dope or start cleaning the kitchen or something Not Fun. (I’m not accusing you of anything, mind. But I’ve noticed that my daughter is just a bit jealous of the computer sometimes.) Show her, don’t tell her, that she can take a pee break and go back to playing.

17

The Hordling is almost 3, and has a bladder the size of a basketball. She is very good at holding it until she wants to go (if she feels like it), and in the past, has been very willing to stop what she’s doing so she doesn’t have an accident, just like Elmo says… And we do continue playing with her after the potty break just to reinforce that the fun continues.

Although she really is her mother’s daughter, so if I announced that now we had to clean the kitchen, she’d run and grab her spray bottle and sponges…

For the rest of you enjoying water games, I hope you’ve got rubber sheets :wink:

18

Oh, I don’t know. She was all smiles, remember, and announced that she’d pee’d. Sometimes you need an extreme reaction to get things through to your kids. We so often handle situations with such deference to the feelings of our children, that we make no impression upon them at all.

One of my co-workers is having this problem with her child…she and her husband are so afraid of hurting the little darling’s delicate psyche that they are nearly on the verge of divorce due to sleep deprivation. The precious angel has manipulated them into hopping to her beck and call at all hours throughout the night, for the most inane reasons…but the child says things in such a “cute” way they feel they can’t say no to her…and if she gets frustrated she does this coughing thing until she throws up. They let her manipulate them until they snap at each other in frustration…but I have the feeling that if one time they snapped at the kid instead, things might change.

And mean can be effective. My confession: back when my daughter was a 2 year old, we lived in Georgia. It was summer, and very hot, and I was extremely pregnant, and the air-conditioning was inadequate. My daughter was going through potty-training, and developed this thing about being wet…not just in the panties, but anywhere on her clothes. If a drop of water fell from her lips onto her shirt while she was drinking, she demanded to change her clothes…would get hysterical until she was in dry clothes. Now it’s summer in Georgia…that water drop will dry in two minutes. But no…she had to change clothes. This would happen multiple times a day. One very hot day, not long before I gave birth to an overdue, 9-lb baby (yeah, I’m trying to paint a picture of extreme discomfort and raging hormones to make myself look better) she pulled that crap again…four tiny drops of water down her shirt, and she started herself a hissy. I lost it. I went into the bathroom, drew a cup of water, walked back down the hall to where she was and said something to the effect that if she thought that was wet, get a load of this…and threw the water right in her face and all over her shirt. Of course she burst into tears, and so did I, and I hugged her and sobbed and apologized…but I also told her she had pushed me too far…and I wouldn’t let her change clothes. We went outside to play, and she dried off in minutes, and she never, ever, ever tried that stunt again. Ever. Not once.

She also did not seem to be traumatized by the event. No tears, no bringing it up again, no fear of Mommy with a cup of water in her hand, no avoidance of the sprinkler or the hose or the pool…okay, she did refuse to learn how to swim until she was twelve, but that’s a different issue…she went into water with alacrity…just refused to take lessons (ballet as well). So last year I came clean with her about this incident…and she has no memory of it, at all. She’s 25. She’s fine. She loves me, and I didn’t harm her…in fact, I’m sure I kept myself from harming her worse by ending that behavior. Was it mean? Absolutely. Was it harmful? No, it was water…that’s the point! Was she in control of her actions at that time? Yes and no…she was two, but two-year-olds can be the most manipulative things on earth, unless we let them know they are out of line. That’s why we are the parents, and they are kids. Do I regret doing it? Yes and no. It worked. I never forgot the stunned look on her face. And I wish some of the logical, reasoning things we had tried in the weeks leading up to this had worked. But it finally took her seeing my rage, and being scared, to change her behavior. Which meant she had control of the behavior from the beginning…she just wasn’t convinced she needed to change.

19

Yeah, true…I guess I just saw a kid peeing by accident as something they have no control over. Plus maybe I’m projecting–I was the kind of neurotic kid who got so upset when she did something wrong that any kind of parental crackdown would’ve been superfluous.

20

Just tell her the story of The Princess and the Pee and how the king and queen finally sold the little princess into slavery when they couldn’t get her potty trained and she worked the rest of her life cleaning out pig slop because really that’s the only place a person who can’t control their pee can work, you know.

… what?