A Sprinkling of Karma
This week I am writing in remembrance of my old toilet seat and in salutation of the new. With five little boys, toilet seats are as disposable as.....toilet paper. I just ask myself, “Is this disgusting, disease-infested, vomit-inducing, light-your-body-on-fire-and-extinguish-it-with-bleach-type of cleaning worth the $20 it would take to buy a brand new one?” For this OCD-stricken mom, the answer is generally a resounding, “ HEAVENS NO!”

When I was growing up, my grandmother had a very peculiar sense of interior decorating. This was especially true when it came to her bathroom, This sense of style is likely because of her ten darling grandchildren, a staggering eight of them were male.

One day in our ceramics class, my grandmother was struck with the overwhelming importance of a message engraved on an unpainted plaster plaque. She was immediately compelled to by truth and import of this greeting, purchased it, instructed me to paint it quickly. She proudly posted this plaque on the wall directly opposite the toilet. The plaque was charmingly shaped like a toilet seat, painted (through my artistic vision) a glowing orchid purple and read in gigantic capital letters, “If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie.” As one of the few females using her facilities, I found this rhetoric disgusting and preferred to carry out my business with my eyes shut to avoid the humiliation of reading about sprinkling or tinkling.

Apparently, karma has a twisted sense of humor. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of parental karma, I will define it. Karma is the cosmic principle that ensures that if you ever used the commode at your grandmother's house with your eyes closed to avoid thinking about boys peeing on the toilet seat, the cosmos will give you FIVE bouncing baby boys as a nagging reminder of this principle. Yes, I have FIVE little sprinklers and tinklers and the thought of that orchid-hued, plaster toilet seat haunts me several times daily.

There have been days of my life that I will use the restroom at our local Walmart because the chances are good that they are less disease-ridden than the one awaiting me at home. I find myself often doing the “tip-toe and levitate maneuver.” I am sure that everyone is familiar with this prim little dance. The one you do on the tops of your tennis shoes when you enter a public toilet that you are sure has hatched more bacteria in the past 20 minutes than Sir Alexander Fleming did in a lifetime. The dance starts with a staccato halt at the doorway and the dramatic realization that you must dance on the tips of your toes like a ballerina to minimize the amount of surface area in contact with the offending facility. Upon reaching your destination, you remove all but the calculated necessary amount of toilet paper from the roll and proceed to wrap (without directly touching) the toilet like a present for Christmas morning. The choreography then calls for you to levitate your body six inches from any surface and finish your biological business quickly. After which, you use only your elbows to wash with scalding hot water (though no soap because these kinds of facilities have a philosophical aversion to the stuff) and exit the room. I personally then use scented hand sanitizers till my pores sting and I smell like I am imbibed with alcohol.

Not wanting to be so crude as to mention the sprinkling and tinkling in my decorating, I chose a more elegant and biblical approach. I called it “The Potty Proclamation.” I actually had a friend think that they were making an amazing revelation when they noted the similarity to the ten commandments. I informed him that it was indeed by design, because the disregard for these commandments may bring down a wrath of biblical proportions. The Proclamation was posted in our home for over a year and the offending behaviors ceased, so it was removed in favor of a beautiful picture of a tulip.

Well folks, the tulip is on hiatus, and The Proclamation is back in its place of honor. I have received great compliments on my commandments, so I will share.

It is prefaced with: “Woe be unto the filthy for they shall be beaten heavily with whatever Mommy deems sufficient until the germ-ridden devil is cleansed from their soul.”

1. Thou shalt not forget to flush
   Might I mention that my little group of monsters are certifiably genius. I am not saying that as a proud mother, I am saying that as someone who thwarts their attempts at world domination on a daily basis. I can truthfully say, I have a brilliant group of little minds. So WHY can they not master the function of the LITTLE PLASTIC LEVER!?! (there is that interrobang again, Honey!) I have noticed that the concept of flushing the toilet and the satisfying gurgle and swish that accompany it, is absolutely enthralling to small children. But the function and operation of the device falls out of their heads once they are potty trained, as if there just isn't enough room for both pieces of information.
2. If thou art male, thou shalt SIT to use the facilities.
   My male friends who have read my proclamation are scandalized by this! They believe that I am robbing my boys of some male right of passage or something. I attribute this to my mother-in-law. My darling husband is the oldest of three children, the younger two being sisters. He therefore, was encouraged to abandon his manly right to urinate from the upright position for the greater good. Yup ladies, I married the perfect guy. He cooks, he cleans, and he NEVER leaves the lid up. I am not suppressing my sons' natural instincts or the snow-inspired artistic tendencies, I am merely making them marketable for their future wives.
3. Thou shalt remove all items from the floor before leaving this room.
   This is self-explanatory. If an article of clothing is moist and on the bathroom floor, I don't want to have to question whether the moisture is from splashing or from overzealous sprinkling and tinkling.
4. Thou shalt not waste toilet paper.
   Being a homeschooling family, I have found that there are offensive behaviors inherent in a public school situation that have gratefully skipped my children. Creative uses of toilet paper is not among those lists of elusive behaviors. The worst is when I am perched helplessly on the throne with an empty cardboard cylinder on the sproingy thing to my left and four or five plush wads sneering at me from their cemented home on the ceiling.
5. Thou shalt replace the toilet paper on the roll when the previous is void of product.
   Fairly self-explanatory, but we have all done the solitary dance that is less tip-toeing and more reminiscent of a sumo wrestler in trying to retrieve a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom closet, which is within view, but just out of reach.
6. Thou shalt not part the Red Seas in the bathtub, allowing it to spill its banks.
   Again, I remind you that I have little maniac genius babies, but somehow they can calculate the amount of magnesium needed to light a small fire, but cannot calculate the maximum volume allowed in our bathtub to minimize the spillage. Additionally, my bathroom is tiled in lovely beige tile with grout that acts as aqueducts in carrying any small amount of water through a series of canals all the way out through the outer bathroom and into the wood-floored hallway an impressive ten feet away.
7. Thou shalt use thine own towel and return it promptly to the assigned hook.
   I am repeatedly asked, mostly by my mother when she visits my house, if I actually OWN towels. The answer is a resounding YES! I have a gaggle of towels, a legion, a myriad, quite nearly a googleplex of drying implements. Amazingly, I post the towels at their station each laundry day and within mere seconds, they have been swallowed by the black hole in my bathroom. I am increasingly tired of choosing between the drip-dry method or the hippy-wiggle dance from trying to put on jeans when wet.
8. Thou shalt return the magazines and reading material to the provided receptacle.
   Refer to the above theory on moisture. A mysteriously moist magazine should require incineration, just to be safe.
9. Thou shalt not bathe anything but thyself and thy pet in the bathtub.
   I am also the mother of two beautiful little dogs and although I sanction the use of the bathtub for bathing and grooming our sweet little spaniels, my children suddenly suffer from “explosive amnesia.” However the understanding of the function and purpose of a bathtub swiftly returns whenever a new and dry roll of toilet paper or a freshly laundered bath towel is temptingly stationed in our bathroom.
10. Thou shalt RINSE the residual filth from the bathtub before exiting this room.
    I am a bath taker, or at least I was until I had children. There is nothing more soothing than candles (also notably absent from my house), a book (now replaced by my e-reader which I find a little precarious see previous note about karma for in-bath reading), and a soothing bubble bath. Although, there is something distinctly not soothing about finding UBF in my bathtub, or Unidentified Bathtub Floaties. Therefore I swiftly stopped making “Me Tea” as my sweet hubby coined the phrase. Although come to think of it....that is even less charming than the little rhyme about sprinkling and tinkling. Goodness, what have I become?