Never a good time

>People used to say that if you wait for a good time to get married, you’ll end up alone.  If you wait for a good time to have children, your childbearing years will pass you by in a blink.

There is no consensus on when is a good time to have a second child, either, because if you do it too early then for the love of God you have two small children in diapers and you have to toilet-train one while the other is learning to roll over and get into everything he shouldn’t be stuffing into his mouth and it is amazing you have any sanity.

If you wait too long then you have finally gotten yourself to the point at which no one needs your help to use the bathroom and then you have to start all over, so don’t you just want to get these diaper-wearing and peeing-on-the-carpet years out of the way as soon as possible?

Ahem.

You can see what’s been going on around here lately.

But the point is that even once you have aforementioned husband and two children, there is still never a good time to do all the things that need to be done.

For example…just when you need to unswaddle the baby for sleeping because he has now figured out how to roll over onto his belly in the swaddle blanket, that is when he will get a raging head cold and will sneeze rivers of snot all over you, keeping you up half the night so that you too share in the delightful cold and snot river production, so the idea of unswaddling him sounds about as intelligent as the polar bear swim.

Or when you are in desperate need of the traveling toddler toilet to disappear, that is when the toddler will decide that he isn’t going to use any toilet anymore for three days for no apparent reason, so that would probably NOT be a good time to switch to the insert that goes on the regular one.  (Or let him out of the house.)

It is beginning to seem like there will always be a trip, a special event, a cold, a holiday, a new baby, or just some other bump on the developmental road that will derail my efforts to move forward.

And so…

That is the answer to why I decided to toilet-train the toddler right before going on a ten-day trip to Michigan.*  Or why I unswaddled the baby when we’re still recovering from colds.  Because there was never going to be a good time, so I figured I might as well get it over with now.

Someday I will look back on all of this and laugh…right?

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*Yes, yes, I’m going to write the second part of Adventures in Toilet Training.  It’s a good story; you’ll laugh (at me), you’ll cry (maybe, from laughing so hard), but I’ve been waiting to get some sleep first.  Of course if this post is true, I’d better not wait for a good time or I’ll never write it.  Ok, ok, you’ve convinced me.  I’ll write it this weekend.