Continuing my week of scary tales, this one takes us back to the bathroom. Yes, the bathroom. There’s nothing scarier than the bathroom. You may remember that I lost an argument with my wife regarding teaching C to stand up in the bathroom.

Well, I’m still paying for it.

The other day found me once again in a public restroom with my 4 year old. In this particular restroom, the toilets were surprisingly high. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice this fact until it was too late.

Our routine at public restrooms is pretty straightforward. If the urinals are too high, we go into a stall. I stand by the door, while he does his business. I’ve tried standing outside the stall, but too many of the toilets flush automatically. Because of his size (I guess), the motion sensor gets triggered at the wrong time and they end up flushing while he’s still using them.

It’s better to be in the stall than to have an unwiped and terrified toddler stumble screaming out of the bathroom with his pants around his legs.

In any case, on this fateful trip, I was having trouble getting the stall door to close. I finally forced it, and turned around to discover the little guy standing at the toilet with his pants around his ankles.

He was holding his hands up over his head and giggling. He looked back over his shoulder at me, “Look, Daddy! Look!”

I stepped around to see that he was resting his privates on the edge of the toilet bowl, at the front where there was no seat. You know where I’m talking about – that nasty sticky yellowish edge of the toilet bowl that often has little hairs stuck on it.

Blech… It makes me queasy just thinking about it.